Have you ever wondered how to better manage the overwhelming number of queries and requests from your organization’s departments? How do you simplify and adapt your service management to all departments while meeting users' needs?
Here is Peter’s story. Being responsible for the IT department in a medium-sized company, he organized a business meeting bringing together decision-makers from each of the company’s flagship departments (Human resources, Material Resources, Procurement, Finance, Sales and Marketing) to get their approval on a project that sought to change the ITSM foundation and consolidate service request management. It’s been several months now that Peter has been working on this project, which could have saved costs to the department and the company as a whole, but also to respond effectively and uniformly to various requests from internal customers.
How do we simplify service request management?
The purpose of Peter’s meeting was to discuss the complexity of the systems in place, the high staff turnover rate and the poor communication between these systems. Anxious to meet (and exceed) the business objectives set for IT, Peter reveals what could be the potential productivity of teams with such service management supporting all the requests. This consolidation could also significantly improve employee satisfaction, resulting in significant external customers and profit gain.
His project overlaps several aspects: establishing an innovative ITSM solution, a tailored self-service portal, a well-planned implementation, and an effective training program. His first objective? Consolidate services (not just the IT services), automate processes related to those services and better measure operational results. Because organizational structures are becoming more complex and interdependent, companies face the challenge of managing all the requests (internal and external) issued by each stakeholder and need to respond effectively. The conduct of these massive internal and external weekly operations requires inking points. These are mainly within the IT department, which is responsible for processing applications for users.
This IT responsibility in today’s businesses raises the need to integrate centralized services as an efficiency and performance vector for this department and all those associated with it. At first, satisfying diverse and varied applications ranging from the query to that of human customer service resources is not easy. Yet with a powerful asset as the concept of the one, Peter believes it is possible to organize these internal and external applications by centralizing them while taking concrete benefits.
Here’s the self-service web portal
The self-service concept, which can be represented by a web portal tailored to different types of customers, stems from effective service catalogue verbalization. This personalized portal then allows the publication of catalogues and enables service consumption, providing users with an efficient, transparent, and timely processing service.
The portal is not limited to IT applications, the portal also allows users from any department to access information and forms and convey different types of queries, whether on the computer or otherwise. “It’s called a simplified multi-departmental service request management,” Peter clarified confidently. One benefit of such management is the flexibility and the personalized experience that it gives these users.
Thus, this type of ITSM practice meets demands from any organization department, allowing users to independently consume services offered on the web self-service portals. Each user will consume based on the reality of the issues specific to the department.
For the IT support department, the portal provides the ability to interact with users, customize support, and manage problem resolution in real-time. Therefore, centralizing service requests through a single system is synonymous with productivity gains. It helps reduce troubleshooting time and streamline the time the technicians give to requests.
Start by simplifying the processes.
To simplify the employees’ work and enhance the user experience, the consolidated service requests must be designed to stick to the business processes of each company and its internal organizational reality. This allows the IT department to operate multi-departmental management of requests and participate in improving the productivity of each team which maintains its autonomy in operations management throughout the queries process.
