ITSM Tips for 2024

 

The SysAid 2023 State of Service Management Report highlighted some significant IT service management (ITSM) and enterprise service management trends. To help your organization prepare for 2024, this blog shares some helpful tips and guidance to help you position your current and future service management capabilities for continued success. First, I’ll share some of the most pertinent statistics from the report; then, I’ll offer those practical tips.

To help your organization prepare for 2024, this blog by @Joe_the_IT_Guy shares some helpful tips & guidance to help you position your current & future service management capabilities for continued success. #ITSM #ServiceDesk Click To Tweet

Two key insights from the SysAid 2023 State of Service Management Report

The SysAid 2023 State of Service Management Report found that employee experience importance had increased dramatically between 2022 and 2023, from 55% to 73% of organizations. It was the number two priority for respondents behind improving productivity with automation.

The report also found that 30% of respondents wanted to expand service management outside the IT department. The top three recipient business functions were Human Resources (HR), Facilities, and Finance.

My ITSM tips for 2024 relate to these two important ITSM trend areas.

With employee experience increasing in importance to #servicedesks between 2022 & 2023 (55% to 73%) you'll need to be on top of your #EX game in 2024 to stay ahead. Here @Joe_the_IT_Guy shares his tips for success. #ITSM Click To Tweet

Employee experience tips

For many organizations, it can be challenging to translate their interest and ambition into actions that bring about the required changes for experience management. Therefore, my practical experience management ITSM tips for 2024 are focused on this need:

• Start collecting experience data before a change, not after it – this allows the success of the change to be understood, with course correction applied as needed. Given the unrelenting pace of change, “waiting for the next change” likely means that experience management never starts.
• Ensure experience management is introduced with specific goals in mind, which will usually relate to improvement. Please don’t introduce it just because it’s a cool ITSM trend or similar.
• Appreciate that experience management requires culture change, with IT personnel needing to recognize and commit to improving how IT services impact employees.
• Agree on the key experience management business stakeholders. They will contribute to the experience management initiative’s scope, be recipients of experience-focused reporting and analytics, and get involved in improvement prioritization.
• Define what experience management means in your organization so everyone agrees on the focus and what’s involved. This definition should align with what your organization wants to achieve.
• Appreciate that experience improvement takes time, especially the associated culture change. Manage business stakeholder expectations accordingly.
• Baseline the current experience before starting to provide a point from where to assess improvements and achievements.
• Ensure experience management targets are meaningful, reflecting “what matters most” to employees and allowing your organization to plan and enact improvement work.
• Move service-review-meeting focus from traditional ITSM metrics to “what matters most” to employees, i.e. the experience management data. Failing to do this delays the impact of the changes being made.
• Expect a temporary drop in feedback “positivity” versus traditional ITSM metrics as hidden issues are finally unearthed through experience data.

It can be challenging to translate employee experience interest & ambition into actions that bring about the required changes for experience management. To help, @Joe_the_IT_Guy shares some practical experience management ITSM tips for 2024.… Click To Tweet

Enterprise service management tips

A common challenge with enterprise service management initiatives is handling the potential complexity caused by the various business functions involved. This results in multiple issues, including the inability to start, “one and done” initiatives (where the enterprise service management program grinds to a halt early), and dissatisfaction with the delivered solutions. To help prevent this:

• Involve prospective business functions early. Not all will be ready for enterprise service management and the related changes. However, their needs must still be represented because the agreed corporate approach will eventually affect them. There are various reasons why some business functions are not ready for enterprise service management. For example, a business function might have higher immediate priorities rather than being disinterested in using automated workflows to improve its operations and outcomes.
• Be careful with the language and positioning used. First, sharing ITSM capabilities under the banner of “enterprise service management” will mean little to other business functions – they’ll probably not know what it is or be interested in service management. Alternatively, terms that resonate with business function needs and vocabulary, such as “digital transformation” and “digital workflow enablement,” will be of more interest. Second, it’s important to recognize that other business functions will likely be disinterested in ITSM capabilities such as incident management. So, don’t sell the ITSM capabilities. Instead, promote the available benefits for operations and outcomes, with the existing corporate ITSM capabilities providing a ready-made and proven solution that’s superior – in terms of time to value, consistency, and cost – to each business function taking its own approach.
• While there will be significant savings from enterprise service management, there will also be costs. To help ensure that optimal benefits are realized from enterprise service management, seek corporate-level rather than business function funding. This funding model helps initiative progression, makes business-function buy-in easier, and minimizes the localized decision-making that results in inconsistency and benefit loss.
• Don’t start an enterprise service management initiative without the required investment in organizational change management (OCM). OCM is important because enterprise service management is much more than “an IT project.” Even though the corporate ITSM tool is shared, it’s really a business improvement initiative that affects ways of working. Consequently, there’s related people change that needs to be effectively managed – such that people buy into the change and ultimately help deliver the expected benefits. You can read more on OCM here.
• Assess and improve (where needed and possible) your IT organization’s ITSM capabilities before sharing them. It’s worth understanding whether a small improvement in an ITSM capability will make a considerably more significant difference when the capability is used by multiple business functions, i.e. the increased scale of use better justifies the cost and effort of improvement. Also, enterprise service management initiatives can be delayed or even derailed if shared ITSM capabilities are viewed as suboptimal or unsuitable.

Avoid your enterprise service management program grinding to a halt early and/or dissatisfaction with the delivered solutions, by following these tips from @Joe_the_IT_Guy. #servicedesk #ESM #ITSM Click To Tweet

If you would like to understand more about either experience management or enterprise service management, please reach out in the comments.