As organizations across industries set goals and plan for the year ahead, two key elements of any growth strategy are efficiency and productivity. How do you use your resources in a way that allows you to do more with what you have?
For many organizations, IT service management, or ITSM, is an important piece of this puzzle (so important that there are multiple frameworks, including ITIL principles, developed to help teams implement it successfully). Delivering traditional support as well as overseeing workplace technology consistently and effectively is one of the most impactful ways to improve productivity.
In this blog, we’ll explore a few best practices that empower IT teams to serve their organizations to their fullest potential.
1. Align Knowledge & Work Management Tools
When your IT team is supported by technology that helps them work effectively, they are able to provide a higher quality of service and increase customer satisfaction. This speaks to the importance of implementing systems that set them up for success.
One simple way to do that is by choosing solutions that integrate your service desk and knowledge base. In the process of responding to tickets, team members must often refer to documentation that helps them understand and communicate relationships and dependencies across their infrastructure.
Building a system where your service desk and knowledge base are integrated helps your team save time by eliminating the need to switch between tools and search multiple sources to find the information they need.
Through Confluence and Jira Service Management, you can align your team’s tools and make everything they need to fulfill requests easily accessible. This doesn’t just include process documentation for managing tickets—it also includes network documentation, cloud services documentation, and everything else the team needs to successfully oversee the solutions an organization relies on every day.
Back to top2. Develop Your Source of Truth
From processes and networks to physical resources and more, IT teams need to understand and communicate lots of information to provide consistent, high-quality service.
The first step to success in this area is developing a source of truth where the team can go to find relevant, up-to-date information. Ideally, this source is not only integrated with the service desk (see best practice #1!) but also presents information in a way that is easy to understand and navigate.
Refer to knowledge management and documentation best practices as you build your source of truth. This will help you make sure your team doesn’t need to spend unnecessary time searching for what they need when responding to customers or managing incidents.
Back to top3. Prioritize Consistency in Change Management
Managing change effectively requires doing it in a way that doesn’t disrupt existing systems or services. When you’re working to accomplish this, consistency is key.
To prioritize consistency in change management, process documentation is a necessity, as well as risk assessment practices. Establishing and following these routines will mean that not only your team, but also those who rely on your team’s services, know what to expect when change occurs.
Back to top4. Implement Thoughtful Automations
In many organizations, spending valuable time on repetitive work is a major blocker to increased productivity. One way to make ITSM more efficient is by automating simple, repetitive tasks, freeing up team members’ time so they can focus on more demanding challenges.
Jira Service Management allows you to automate certain workflows and processes—just set it up once and your team is ready to go. As is the case for many of the best practices in this list, investing time now to establish systems that help you save time later will have a significant long-term impact.
Back to top5. Empower Self-Service
Self-service means customers can find answers to common questions themselves by searching through articles and documents that clearly lay out the proper steps to follow.
Like your team’s internal source of truth, you can build your repository of self-service articles in Confluence. By creating a separate space for self-service and publishing pages to that space, you can help customers find the answers to common questions and simple fixes for uncomplicated problems.
This initiative may take some time and effort on the team’s part, but it’s a worthwhile investment—it will give them time to focus on more complex problems and speed up service times.
Back to topGet More Tips for ITSM Documentation
For many of the best practices in this list, documentation is a crucial element. At Gliffy, we’re all about helping technical teams develop visual documentation that is easy to create and lives right in Confluence.
Explore our blog to learn more about building effective ITSM documentation—we’ve got plenty of resources to help you set your team up for success.