IT service management shouldn't feel like a game of whack-a-mole. Reactive firefighting is often the result of preventable problems. There's a difference between teams that are always in crisis mode and those who feel like they're on top of things. The difference comes down to best practices.
Whether you're just getting started with IT service management (ITSM) or you've been around for a while, there's always more to learn. For a quick refresher on the fundamentals of effective IT service delivery, check out this list of ITSM best practices.
We cover the most important ITSM best practices that every IT infrastructure and operations manager should know. Each ITSM best practice addresses a common problem IT organizations face and provides a practical way to solve it. If you want to improve your ITSM processes or ITSM tool implementation, read this list.
1. Implement Core ITSM Processes Before Everything Else
Trying to do it all on day one of ITSM implementation is a recipe for overwhelm and failure. The most successful ITSM deployments start with three core processes: incident management, request fulfillment, and change management. Each of these processes provides early wins to your team and demonstrates value to stakeholders.
Focus first on getting these three processes documented and running smoothly. Many IT teams find that users are using requests as incidents and vice versa, so make sure your categories are set up in a way that makes sense to end users and helps them know where to go. Also make sure you have processes in place for each core ITSM process so the support teams know where the requests should be routed and who is responsible.
Once you've nailed down your core three processes, you can start to build out to more advanced ITSM concepts like problem management, knowledge management, and service level management. This approach reduces implementation stress for your IT team and lets users and other stakeholders adjust to new processes over time without interrupting service.
Tip: If you have a ticketing system, use the past 6-12 months of ticket data to identify the top 5-10 most frequently opened incidents. These are great candidates for automation or self-service catalog items.
2. Keep Your ITSM Tool Configuration Out of the Box
Customization is technical debt you'll pay for later during upgrades. Customizing your ITSM tool to mirror old processes is one of the biggest mistakes teams make during ITSM implementation. New platforms like ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, ProService, ManageEngine, Cherwell, ITarian, and hundreds more all use ITIL best practices for a reason.
Customizations and workflows create technical debt that eventually needs to be repaid. The more custom fields, workflows, and business rules you add to your system, the more maintenance and testing those customizations require. They also need to be rebuilt or recoded for every platform upgrade.
It's more important to get your processes right than to get your tool customized to 100% match how things were before. Look at your current processes and adapt them to work with your ITSM software instead of trying to build every detail of your old system inside a new tool. This strategy opens up access to upgrades, community best practices, and easier scalability.
If you absolutely must customize, make sure you document the business value of that customization and why it's necessary. If you can't link it to a real business need or business value, it's unnecessary customization.
Understanding the relationship between IT asset management and IT service management helps you see where standardization is critical and where flexibility adds value.
3. Automate Repetitive Tasks and Service Requests
Automation isn't about replacing your IT team, it is about enabling your IT team to focus on the work that only they can do. If you have skilled technical professionals spending time entering data for password resets, basic software access requests, or similar low-level tasks, that's time they're not spending solving problems or innovating.
Build a catalog of self-service portal options for the most common service requests. Password resets, access requests for standard software packages, and standard hardware provisioning are some good examples. AI-powered automation can route, escalate, and even start troubleshooting for many types of incidents.
Look at your service desk data and look for patterns in resolution times, ticket volume, and recurring issues. If you see an incident type that repeats dozens of times per month with similar resolution steps, that's a clear signal for automation.
Just make sure you have skilled professionals who know how to design workflows using both ITSM best practices and how to work with the specific tools you have available. Don't automate a broken process - fix the process first, then automate it.
4. Build a Knowledge Base That Gets Used
A knowledge base is only valuable if people can find answers when they need them. There are a lot of organizations that have a gold mine of knowledge management documents no one ever looks at because the articles are out of date, hard to find, or written in overly technical language that users can't understand.
Start with the most common incidents and requests that come to your support team. When someone on your team closes an incident that keeps popping up over and over again, document that solution in a KB article. Use the same words your users would use to describe the problem; it improves searchability and makes articles more relatable.
Your knowledge base should be integrated into your self-service portal and incident management workflow. Surface articles when a user creates a ticket, and prompt your support team to link/create a KB article when an incident is resolved. This creates a virtuous cycle where your KB grows along with your support experience.
Measure your KB usage through metrics like article views, user ratings, and deflection rates. Low article views or poor user ratings mean time for an update or retirement. High deflection rates indicate you need more and better self-service knowledge base articles.
5. Define and Monitor SLAs That Matter to Your Business
Service level agreements are not just metrics for your IT teams. They are commitments to your stakeholders that you're going to deliver on in a way that aligns with what matters to their success. Unrealistic SLAs cause stress and burnout for your teams, while SLAs that are set too loosely don't improve service levels at all.
Understand the impact on the business. Not all incidents are created equal. The loss of an ecommerce site for several hours during peak business has a hugely different impact on the business than one user not being able to sync their email to their mobile device. Your SLAs should match that by having different priority levels, timeframes, and response requirements for each type of incident.
Use real-time SLA monitoring to take the data you're gathering and use it to drive continuous improvement. If you are failing SLAs for certain incident types, investigate what is causing the issue. Are you understaffed? Are your escalation processes broken? Is the SLA itself unrealistic? This data-driven approach lets you optimize resource allocation and set stakeholder expectations.
Monitoring in real-time also lets you proactively prevent violations before they happen by identifying potential issues before they impact service delivery.
6. Implement Change Management to Reduce Outages and Disruptions
Unplanned, unmanaged changes are the single biggest cause of outages and disruptions. Implementing a structured change management process will help you not be the change that takes down the database every time. Think of it as protecting the things that work against the chaos of an organization in constant flux.
The key is having a documented change management process that teams must follow for each change request, adjusted to the risk and criticality of the change. Standard changes (low risk, pre-approved) move through automated workflows. Normal changes are assessed, approved, and scheduled. Emergency changes get expedited approval and post-implementation review but must still be documented.
Make your change management process transparent and collaborative. Build a change calendar with all scheduled changes across your organization. This prevents conflicts, lets teams collaborate, and builds visibility for business stakeholders into what's happening in their IT environment. It also creates a trail of documentation for if things do go wrong so you can troubleshoot and learn from incidents.
Connect your change management process with your IT infrastructure monitoring strategy to validate changes are having the expected impact and not creating new issues.
7. Measure with KPIs that Align to Your Business Objectives
You can't manage what you don't measure, but the trap of measuring everything is that you get so much noise you don't know what matters. The most effective ITSM teams measure the right KPIs that tie directly to business objectives and service delivery success. You should be able to answer the question of why an incident took x hours to resolve or why request volume is up 30% this month.
Key ITSM metrics include things like mean time to resolution, first-contact resolution rate, incident volume trends, and customer satisfaction. But translate that into the business impact metrics your stakeholders care about, such as how much downtime was avoided or prevented, how user productivity was impacted, or ROI of your automation efforts.
Build executive dashboards that take the raw IT health and performance metrics and present it in business terms your C-suite can understand. They don't need to know your ticket volume, but they do need to know if IT is serving as a business enabler or not. You can use this data to demonstrate value, make resource requests, and identify areas where strategic investments would help.
Monitoring in real-time also helps you spot trends before they become problems. Is incident volume up in one area? Take a look before it impacts SLAs. Are resolution times getting longer? Find the bottlenecks or skills gaps in your workflows and address them.
For those organizations who manage both IT and operational technology (OT), understanding how monitoring prevents costly downtime demonstrates the business value of integrating monitoring and service management.
Summary
The key takeaways from this list of ITSM best practices are:
- Start with the basics. Jumping in headfirst and trying to do it all from the start is overwhelming for your teams and doesn't produce the early wins that help stakeholders buy-in to a bigger ITSM implementation project.
- Resist the urge to over-customize your tools. Doing so creates technical debt that will cost you later during upgrades and maintenance. Standard best practices like those in modern ITSM tools are best practices for a reason—design your processes around the tool, not the other way around.
- Automate where possible. Take a look at your data to find areas for automation. If the same 10 problems pop up over and over again and have simple, standardized resolution steps, that's a perfect candidate for either automation or a self-service knowledge base article. You can even link the two to drive better deflection of service desk tickets.
The one thing all the most effective ITSM implementations have in common is that they align with business needs, not just IT preferences. They use data to drive continuous improvement and balance standardization with flexibility to adapt to new technology and business changes.
Tips for Best ITSM Practices
The best ITSM practices will vary from one organization to the next. There's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all ITSM implementation, but there are common themes among the most effective teams. Remember that ITSM tools are enablers, not silver bullets. You can put all the best practices in the world into your tool and still have chaos.
The most effective ITSM tool platforms will amplify the strengths of your organization if you have:
- Clear and documented processes. ITSM tools are only as good as the processes behind them. If your processes are undocumented or only exist in people's heads, that chaos is built into your tool when you replicate your team's current reality.
- Clear communication. Support requests and incidents need to flow between teams and across divisions. Breakdowns in communication are often why automation isn't implemented or why knowledge bases don't work.
- A culture of continuous improvement. Every organization faces challenges and areas for improvement, but the teams who are moving forward and finding ways to get better all the time are the ones who will be the most effective.
The key is not to wait until everything is "perfect" to start taking steps to become a better ITSM team. No organization starts out with all three of these. Take one practice from this list, start small, measure the results, and build on your momentum.
Getting ITSM Right Is the Key to Better IT Service Delivery
Not every item on this list needs to be implemented at the same time. Start with the practices that are most relevant to your current situation. Are you drowning in incidents? Automation and self-service options might be your next step. Is your current tool upgrade causing headaches? Spend some time getting your processes organized and documented so you can minimize customization and maximize out-of-the-box functionality.
Pick one item on the list and start with that. Measure the results and then you can build to the next best practice. You'll start to see changes across your team that are aligned with this goal of not being overwhelmed. Your IT team won't feel like they're in crisis mode all the time, your end users will see reduced resolution times and better service delivery, and your business stakeholders will view IT as an enabler of business goals instead of just another cost center.
Summary
Effective ITSM starts with three core processes: incident management, request fulfillment, and change management. Keep your ITSM tool configuration out-of-the-box to avoid technical debt during upgrades. Automate repetitive tasks and build self-service options for common requests. Create a searchable knowledge base that users actually use. Define SLAs based on business impact, not arbitrary metrics. Implement structured change management to prevent outages. Measure KPIs that align with business objectives, not just IT metrics. The key is starting small, measuring results, and building momentum. Don't wait for perfection—pick one practice and begin improving your IT service delivery today.
Sumber : https://blog.paessler.com/7-itsm-best-practices-that-deliver-exceptional-it-service