This article guide aims to provide you with a comprehensive understanding of the core ideas of IT service management (ITSM), covering ITSM procedures and workflows, benefits, best practices, and how to implement them. Learn how to align IT with your custom software development company goals and provide services quickly.
What are the ITSM Processes?
The ITILv3-certified specialists on development companies team use ITSM processes in their daily work and apply them for our customers in the following five stages:
- The first and most important stage is Service Strategy (SS). Here, you’ll figure out what your IT does, what your users/customers need, and whether the IT service is financially worthwhile. SS, in general, aids in a better knowledge of your IT services. Service Portfolio, Financial Management, Business Relationship Management, and other procedures are examples.
- Service Strategy’s ‘assistant’ is Service Description (SD). It includes a full written description of your services to go along with the strategic findings. SD ensures that your IT service delivery meets the required standards, that your custom software development firm has sufficient capacity to supply the services, and that these services are available, secure, and reliable.
- Service Transition (ST) is in charge of transforming your services from paper to action. Apart from that, ST keeps your services as stable and unaffected as possible while permitting them to be dynamic by making changes slowly and cautiously. Change, Release, and Knowledge Management are examples of processes at this level.
- Service Operation (SO) ensures that your services are operational and that any outages are resolved quickly. Five primary procedures assist SO in accomplishing this:
- Management of events
It keeps track of how services are running. It tells you if there is a problem and attempts to remedy it.
- Management of incidents
The goal is to get IT procedures back to normal as quickly as feasible. If anything isn’t operating properly, the IT team will quickly fix such a reboot.
- Management of issues
The fundamental cause of occurrences is addressed. If a problem is discovered, the FortySeven47 IT team investigates why it occurred and how it may be appropriately resolved so that similar occurrences do not occur again.
- Request fulfillment
Attempts at relieving some of the pressure on Change Management in ST by dealing with low-risk, repeatable, and pre-defined circumstances. For example, when a newcomer requires the installation of a computer, creating an account, and so on.
- Management of access
Accounts and passwords are dealt with. Because password resets are the most prevalent requests in Access Management, automating the fulfillment of such requests can save a software development company with 600,000 yearly password resets as much as $1,850,000 per year. Savings like these are frequent among our ITSM installation clients.
According to our experience implementing and maintaining ITSM solutions for our customers (including a multinational confectionery maker and a 40,000-employee European bank), the most popular processes of the SO stage are Incident Management and Request Fulfillment.
- The final stage is Continuous Service Improvement (CSI), which aims to perfect your services continuously. To do so, your custom software or mobile app development company must keep track of IT performance and respond to any issues that arise.
What Does ITSM Processes Bring?
ITSM can provide numerous advantages because it is a very structured approach to the development of IT services. However, the opposite side of the coin should not be overlooked.
The Positive
ITSM methods have the advantage of bringing clarity and transparency to your IT system. Is there, however, something else hidden behind these hazy words? There is, indeed. Customers consider the following as the most significant benefits of implementing ITSM in their custom software development companies:
- ITSM methods assist IT departments in maintaining the availability of IT services. IT teams can reduce downtime (when services are disrupted) and boost service availability by following explicit rules.
- The user/customer satisfaction rate improves as custom software developer or IT teams’ response and resolution times are reduced and the overall service availability.
- IT service management costs are reduced by taking a more efficient approach to daily operations and automating parts of them.
- ITSM methods ensure that IT services are rock-solid and adaptable. Release and Change Management aid in achieving enterprise-wide ‘cautious’ IT dynamics.
The Evil
Even though FortySeven eventually assisted them in finding solutions to each point on the ‘dark side’ of ITSM, our clients admit that there was often some opposition in their midst when it came to implementing ITSM processes. Here are some of the “bad” aspects of ITSM that contributed to the resistance:
- ITSM processes were seen as “too big of a change” because they took a lot of time and effort to implement. But, most crucially, it necessitated a shift in their employees’ mindsets. As a result, learning the new procedures was received with a lot of opposition. We view the necessity for IT personnel to adapt their approach and the need to educate its management as a requirement for success in such circumstances.
- When our customers opted to implement ITSM processes, they discovered that they were quite costly to implement. Here’s what a custom software development company should spend money on:
- Eventually, a corporation will utilize a specific software to support ITSM (FreeHelpDesk, Jira, Zendesk, BMC Helix Remedy, ServiceNow, etc.). Free tools don’t include all ITSM procedures and aren’t easy to keep up with. Although mid-level platforms are not prohibitively expensive, they lack critical capabilities. Furthermore, full ITSM solutions can be quite costly. The options can be overwhelming, but with FortySeven as their ITSM consultant, our customers could quickly identify a solution that met their needs.
- A corporation must invest in employee training to teach them the key ideas of ITIL, and it may also be necessary to provide training to users of the new ITSM platform.
- Some ITSM processes (particularly Change Management) introduce a layer of bureaucracy to IT departments’ work. It occurs in almost all sophisticated hierarchical software development companies and is a result of the formalization of IT processes.
The Balance
Despite all of the potential for ‘evil’ that ITSM processes might bring the clients of FortySeven software professionals to believe that ITSM is on the lighter side of the force. A corporation must invest in upgrading its IT structure and implementing ITSM practices. However, the benefits (improved IT service delivery and lower IT support costs) will quickly outweigh the implementation challenges.
Conclusion
According to the ITSM specialists of a custom software agency, the main principle here is that no firm should strive to comprehend everything at once. The transformation process must take place gradually, one step at a time, with specified small-scale goals in mind (reducing operational costs or increasing first-response time). If you’re having difficulties doing this, talk to one of our ITSM consultants about identifying small-scale, long-term goals that would be an excellent place to start your ITSM journey.