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• Getting the basic ITSM capabilities right – there are a number of commonly adopted ITSM capabilities that IT service desks continue to struggle with.
• Finding the time for improvement – IT staff can often be too busy “fighting fires” to spend time preventing them in the first place.
Address What’s Most Important for Your Organization
In the context of the above-listed points, there are likely to be many other improvement opportunities available. Some will be quick wins, while others will take considerable time and effort. Some will be costly, while others will not make a dent in your limited budgets.
• Budget, time and resources are key factors in deciding which improvement opportunities to tackle first.
But, importantly, it’s the understanding of what’s most important for your organization. There’s a need to ensure that whatever you plan to improve, it is truly aligned with what’s needed at a business level, rather than simply something that will improve IT operations and outcomes.
Avoid Potential Improvement Conflicts
• This might be an odd situation to consider because surely every positive change in IT is a positive change for the organization as a whole? Sadly, it’s not. A simple example is the reduction in ticket handling costs by taking measures to shorten the average call handling time. It might save IT a dollar per ticket, but what if the quality of service is impacted negatively? The business-level cost of the affected employees not being able to work could easily be ten times the savings.
Identify the Right Improvement Opportunities
There’s always going to be a wealth of opportunities to improve your IT service desk, especially when you
consider the number of different perspectives you can take to identify and agree on improvements.
For example:
• Focusing on business needs versus employee needs (and appreciating the mutual wins)
• Addressing pain points versus realizing opportunities
• Tackling people, process, or technology issues (or combinations across all three)
• Improving something that’s already in place versus adding something new
• Improving a weakness or improving an existing strength
• Working with an existing ITSM best practice versus leveraging a new approach
Understand the Common IT Service Desk Challenges
There are a variety of commonly felt challenges and available opportunities to improve. For example:
• Working with high IT support volumes and reducing budget – the pressure of more IT services, and perhaps people, to support and the need to “do more with less”.
• Service desk tool issues – the current tool hinders more than it helps. And it probably never delivered
on its promises and the expected return on investment (ROI).
• Staff recruitment and retention issues – this might be due to budgetary limitations or the availability of
suitably skilled staff.
• Struggling to quantify what “value” is for your organization – there’s a need for IT service desk to be
more focused on what’s important to the organization and the key stakeholders within it.
• Keeping up with changing business needs and technology landscapes – the business wants quicker
change and innovation. And there’s more technology to support.
• Meeting increasing employee expectations – employees are bringing their personal customer
experiences into the workplace.