With extraordinary events forcing the entire world to undergo an unprecedented adjustment period, organizations and employees alike have difficulty figuring out what remote working means to them. In contrast, others have gone through complete digital transformations to adjust and cope effectively.

Now that businesses are cautiously reopening their offices and assuming a new normal, IT teams must ensure that productivity does not suffer. After all, some sort of remote or dispersed working appears to be here to stay for the foreseeable future.

Ultimately, following IT Service Management (ITSM) best practices and automating operations within the service desk and beyond the ticket can help.

ITSM (IT Service Management Processes): Defined

As you may have noticed by now, ITSM stands for IT Service Management. ITSM attempts to match the supply of IT services to the business’ needs. ITSM products are designed to provide satisfactory service to end-users.

ITSM is a set of policies, processes, and procedures for delivering IT goods and services that guide users and support IT services centered on customers.

ITSM Processes

The ITSM process aids the management of IT services in organizations. Organizations must manage the service’s capabilities and how it operates, changes, and what happens when it encounters issues.

You can find many distinct ITSM processes in other ITSM frameworks in various formats. The following are some critical ITSM processes:

• Availability Management: This minimizes service interruptions by optimizing IT infrastructure services, capabilities, and support. It also provides consistent levels of service to meet the needs of the business.
• Change Management: This refers to the standard strategies and procedures used to handle all ITSM service modifications.
• Incident Management: This is a day-to-day method for restoring regular, acceptable service with the least disruption to the organization.
• Release Management: This encompasses the testing, releasing, and verifying of changes to the IT environment.
• Problem and Asset Management: The core cause of any incident is a problem. An IT company may temporarily tackle the problem, but it will not permanently solve the problem. As a result, problem management is a method of resolving difficulties to improve service delivery and performance.

Although each ITSM Process focuses on a different facet of IT management, the ITSM process and workflows usually get implemented in five basic steps to work around problems and assure the company’s productivity.

• Step 1: Audit – Companies conduct an audit of their current ITSM operations to identify any weaknesses.
• Step 2: Educate – When implementing ITSM procedures, organizations educate, communicate, and involve stakeholders.
• Step 3: Outline – Companies outline essential success elements and track KPIs and measurements.
• Step 4: Utilize ITSM tools – Organizations use ITSM technologies to automate the process.
• Step 5: Feedback – Companies create a feedback loop for a more effective and streamlined communication funnel.

Adopting the Best IT Practices

When a full workforce is remote, traditional IT support methods might become ineffective since IT must simultaneously deal with routine and unique demands, potentially overstretching its capabilities while maintaining services. Thus, businesses must rely on their ITSM solutions to work at their best to efficiently fulfill these unforeseen expectations.

ITSM best practices in the age of remote employment entail providing a comprehensive and easy-to-understand service catalog and communicating with users immediately and effectively about any changed or unavailable services or system faults. Maintaining clear and open communication channels for remote teams is critical to maintaining productivity as people’s work evolves.

In the ITSM framework, effectively managing IT as an enterprise-wide, service-oriented entity is the goal. This framework will only be successful when the following factors are working together, hand-in-hand:

• People: Assists organizations in providing a sufficient and high-quality supply of skills and knowledge.
• Processes: Includes IT and organization-specific practices, rules, and procedures, among other things.
• Technology: Provides logical and physical technology infrastructure, including hardware, software, database management systems, and so on.
• Organization: It details the internal and external business elements that influence IT and how IT and the organization interact. It also discusses how IT services are affected.
• Integration: How IT services should get connected with a given business model is also critical. It also encompasses what services IT offers and how those services are delivered.

Furthermore, utilizing automation technology might alleviate the great pressure that IT service desk staff have been under in recent months. When used in conjunction with service management systems, automation can assist end-users in resolving service requests without assistance from a service desk analyst. Here are some of today’s best IT practices:

Moving IT Resolutions Closer to the End-user

Shifting left and bringing IT resolutions closer to the end-user will reduce problem escalation and relieve IT professionals of some of their responsibility. IT experts can spend more time on activities that require their full attention, rather than routine requests like password resets, thanks to effective noise reduction.

Moreover, when creating a ticket, you can guide users through a step-by-step incident management procedure that will allow them to diagnose and address some issues independently, preventing basic requests from being added to the queue.

Reducing the Workload

Automation is a critical tool for the larger workforce during this difficult time since it reduces the workload faced by IT staff and allows them to use their time more efficiently. Every employee has distinct conditions at home. Therefore it has never been more critical to have IT assistance available 24 hours a day, seven days a week — this is where automation and self-service may help with problem management.

Employing Additional Tools such as Automation

While businesses and employees confront increased uncertainty about the return to work date approaches, it is critical to maintain staff productivity. Companies should focus on keeping their affairs in order using the ITSM framework and employ other technologies, such as automation, to decrease the load on IT professionals. This allows remote workers to self-serve where possible to deal with the difficulty of remote IT support.

Conclusion

While cutting IT expenses is important for boosting competitiveness; you can use ITSM for much more than just cost-cutting and IT service delivery. It can also help achieve enterprise-wide goals including, increasing productivity and reducing the time it takes to produce goods and services.

Learn more about ITSM & Workflows Automation, Employee & Business Workflows, and what other solutions Run2biz can offer you.