How do we create an Effective IT Service Management Strategy?

There shouldn’t be a separation of business and IT - IT departments are part of the business and in today’s world there is no business without an IT department. We all have the same responsibility to make sure our organisation delivers the best service for our customers. We are here to deliver the company’s purpose, not deliver the technology.

Be proactive, not reactive

Not being close enough to business and not owning the service end-to-end positions IT to respond to changes reactively and minimises IT credibility as a forward thinking consultant for business. In today’s world, our businesses desperately need our leadership in this area as most services and business models rely on technology.

IT departments should reflect on how much they are interacting with business, and the role they play in these interactions. So, go outside of your department and immerse yourself in the business.

Innovate

Innovation is the key differentiating factor in a successful IT service management strategy. Embed the process to allow you and your team to keep innovating. With anything, the most successful players are the ones that embrace innovation and continuously improve process. This needs to be embedded in your daily activities, however it is a challenge to develop this mindset in organisations. Organising hackathons and ‘inspire’ days are useful practices to start making time in businesses for innovation and creativity.

In the IT service management space, it’s also important to innovate around how to best monitor, identify and work through new opportunities and trends. Consider adoption of automation for certain tasks, freeing up our IT professionals for more value-add work and give them time to reflect and strategise.

Be agile and flexible

Imagine creating huge programs with hundreds of requirements and milestones that will take months, with nothing delivered until everything is perfectly ready. This generally ends up with delays, you go over budget, there are lots of frustrations, and when you finally deliver the program, it’s way too late and not what your customers are expecting from you. Sound familiar? You can change this story.

Kill all the big projects, keep regularly checking the priorities with business, identify what to deliver next, split your deliverables into small pieces and deliver them end-to-end with Agile methodologies, and keep repeating this process. This will allow continuous delivery of changes to market, experimentation of new ideas quickly, and allow an ability to adapt and respond to changing market conditions and customer expectations.

Project funding to service capacity

Based on the approaches previously mentioned, stop funding initiatives project by project. Instead, create your service strategy and allocate your funding for each service depending on the criticality. Allow the Service Manager and the function to define the road map for the service. The outcome of this will be a more strategic and effective service management strategy that is aligned with the business reality and changing customer needs.

Service management is much more than a support activity. It is linked to business strategy, market reality, customer needs and preferences, commercial reality, design, project delivery and off course support. IT departments that involve all these activities proactively will be in the best position to deliver exceptional results aligned to business expectations and goals. It’s time to think about our leadership role in business differently and take a much bolder approach to delivering great services.