ITSM in 2022: How to manage through the pandemic

• how it was before
• what we believe will be the trend in 2022
• how you can prepare your IT Service Management (ITSM) for a future where you need to be more agile than ever

What the organizations looked like before the pandemic

To understand where we are heading we need to look at the past. Before the pandemic we were traveling to the office, more or less every day. Meeting our colleagues and customers face-to-face, both in meetings and in social contexts.

Many organizations had at this point started improving their ways of working (WoW) - moving away from old waterfall structures to a more Agile WoW. All this came to a halt when people had to work from home and many projects were put on hold. What many organizations realized was that having a workforce working from home demanded different technology, new ways of working. 

A great example is the whiteboard with post-its on it. The team of developers standing around talking, pointing and writing. That now had to be digitized. Preferably yesterday. In only a couple of days, there was a surge in  demand for digital collaboration tools.

The trend 2022: Increased demand for high velocity ITSM

We have seen a trend of digitizing the issue flows - from an on-location whiteboard or kanban/scrum boards - to a workplace where people can work from anywhere. This has of course led to an increased time-to-resolution for the organizations that didn’t have a digital kanban board at all. This fact has really driven organizations to move faster in these types of investments.

Not a huge surprise but we strongly believe that the trend for 2022 will be an even higher demand for Agile and high velocity IT Service Management Systems. An obvious option is Jira Service Management. A high quality system that can be implemented fast and is easy to use within the whole organization, working from anywhere.

How to optimize your current ITSM to meet the challenges in 2022

So how can you adapt and optimize your current ITSM to the constantly changing world and an uncertain future? Being Agile is the foundation, and a good way to optimize is to use the ITIL®4 guiding principles. This is one way of thinking when adapting to the post-pandemic world.

There are 7 guiding principles or recommendations that can guide your organization in all circumstances, regardless of changes in goals, strategies, type of work, tools or management structure. They are: 

• Focus on value
  What requirements bring most value to your organization? A service portal can be the entry point for posting requirements.

• Start where you are
  Have you already implemented a tool for ITSM? Then you can continue to build on it and improve your practices. One way is to incorporate your software development practices into the ITSM portfolio. This way you have full traceability from the requests and incidents to new feature requests and bug fixes.

• Progress iteratively with feedback
  Start where you are, but have a vision and set your goals where you want to be. Break down “the elephant” into smaller portions and start delivering, practice by practice, tool by tool. Obtain, plan, build and deliver… Don´t forget to demonstrate your deliverables to get feedback.

• Collaborate and promote visibility
  Get your knowledge database up to speed with new fresh articles and get your team to review old articles, and show your progress in dashboards and reports. Have a colleague review your article before publishing and collaborate around your content.

• Think and work holistically
  Set up your ITSM portfolio in a way that is flexible and can fast be adapted to organizational changes. Think holistically and test your portfolio end to end.

• Keep it simple and practical
  This is where your Lean thinking comes into play. Be user friendly and keep your workflows short, simple and practical.

• Optimize and automate
  By optimizing and automating your practices, you free up time for your staff to focus on efficiency and the customer experience.

We have changed our ways of working and we will continue doing that as the future is changing. Using ITIL® 4 Guiding principles when implementing and improving your WoW around ITSM creates good conditions for the organization's IT delivery and in the end a better customer experience. A good tip is to focus on what is most important for your customer and start there. And of course optimize and automate as much as possible along the way.