Have you ever wondered how to better manage the overwhelming amount of queries and requests coming from your organization’s departments? How to simplify and adapt your service management to all departments while meeting the needs of users?
Here is Peter’s story. Being responsible for the IT department in a medium-sized company in the Montreal area, he organized a business meeting bringing together decision-makers from each of the company’s flagship department (Human Ressources, 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 to simplify service request management?
The purpose of Peter’s meeting was to discuss the complexity of the systems in place, the high rate of staff turnover and 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 bring a significant improvement in employee satisfaction, and which would result in significant external customers and ultimately profits gain.
His project overlaps with several aspects: the establishment of an innovative ITSM solution and a tailored self service portal, a well planned implementation as well as 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 are faced with the challenge of managing all the requests (internal and external) issued by each stakeholder and need to respond effectively. The conduct of these internal and external massive weekly operations requires inking points. These are particularly within the IT department which is responsible for processing applications for users.
This IT responsability in today’s businesses raises up the need for the integration of centralized services as an efficiency and performance vector for this department and all those associated with it. At first sight, to satisfy 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 lots of 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, is stemming from an effective service catalogs verbalization. This personalized portal then allows the publication of catalogs and enables service consumption, providing users with an efficient, transparent and timely processing service. Not limited to IT applications, the portal also allows users from any department to access information, forms, and to convey different types of queries, computer or other. “It’s called a simplified multi-departmental service reques management” Peter clarified in a confident tone. One benefit of such management is the flexibility and the personalized experience that gives these users. Thus, this type of ITSM practice meets demands from any departments of the organization, allowing each user to independently consume services that are 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 their users, customize support and manage the resolution of problems in real time. Therefore, the centralization of service requests through a single system is synonymous with productivity gains to the extent that it helps reduce troubleshooting time and streamlining the time given by the technicians to requests.
Start by simplifying the processes
To simplify the employees’ work and enhance the user experience, the consolidated service requests needs to be designed to stick to the business processes of each company and their internal organizational reality. This allows the IT department to operate a 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.