itSMF Bulletin December 2021 | Page 17

Our approach to IT service management design is to incorporate personas.

 Personas are often used to represent a group of customers. Personas summarize key characteristics  for one or more individuals who exhibit similar attitudes, goals, and behaviours in relation to a service and a service provider.

 

When discussing broad categories of  service consumers, ranges must be used in order to summarize attributes of the entire group. These statistics are often  too  impersonal and difficult to remember when designing  the  customer  journey.   In contrast, a persona is a singular user derived from the data range to highlight specific details and important features of the group.

Problem In Chair, Not In Computer.

 When an IT team designs with empathy, the starting place is knowledge of the human experience of the target audience. It is the prerequisite and foundation of all human centred design space endeavours. This must be done with careful observation and attention to the target audience.

While it is tempting to assume we already know what people need and want, a thorough grounding of this knowledge will set your IT service management on a solid foundation. Ideally, conduct a proper analysis with surveys, other pertinent data and observation. 

Over to You:

1.) Who are your end users and what are their motivations, context, needs, and constraints?

2.) What concrete action can you do to gain deeper empathy for your users’ human experience?

3.) Describe two priorities that the Oral B designers utilized in developing empathy for their target human experience.

About the Author

Katrina Macdermid

The world’s leading authority in IT Service Management

ITIL Author, Educator & Global Ambassador

Customer centric organisations are known to outperform their competitors simply because they have built a relationship and understanding of their customers. In the last 10 years consumer demands have forced businesses to shift away from their traditional business models to meet this demand; what has not changed is IT service management. The use of decades old processes remains the mainstay for many IT organisations with initiatives to improve or transform rarely resulting in optimum outcomes.

To contact Katrina for more information CLICK HERE