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Core ITSM Practices

Core ITSM practices

  1. IT practices have to be standardized and managed effectively.
  2. For example, if a phone application functions as a storefront for a business and is crashing for Android users, that adds up to potentially thousands in missed sales for each minute the app is down.
  3. Without a standardized 'practice' for incident management, the team won't have an effective workflow to push a resolution.
  4. ITSM solutions help streamline these practices, helping teams work more effectively, and ultimately deliver greater dollar value to a business.

How do these IT teams manage their services?

  1. Great question. IT teams use a variety of frameworks or methodologies to name and organize the practices that manage their services.
  2. A common framework is ITIL, which provides teams with 'practices' they can implement to deliver great service.

Remember those ITIL practices mentioned at the beginning of the course?

  1. Modern IT service teams use organizational resources and follow repeatable procedures to deliver services across various areas. The repeatable procedures are referred to in ITIL as practices.

  2. ITSM software solutions enable the implementation of these “practices."

There are 34 practices in total, but here are the core practices that most organizations implement, and which Atlassian focuses on in our products to deliver IT services.

Examples

  1. Service Request Management : Resolving a customer's service request and managing the lifecycle of all service requests.
  2. Example: Newly joined Employee needs to access VPN.
  3. Incident Management : Resolving any kind of disruption of IT function - from issues with credit card readers to web page outages.
  4. Example: IT Apps are crashing after new update was rolled out in morning. Need to Fix this asap, affecting multiple users/ team.
  5. Problem Management : Investigating the root cause of multiple incidents, to prevent the problem from happening again.
  6. Example: Looks like crash reports are happening only only on the android devices. What can be done to improve app compatibility with android platform.
  7. Change Enablement : Ensuring that if IT practices need to change (migrating to a cloud based software solution for example) there are minimal disruptions to regularly scheduled business functions and services.
  8. Example: Payroll database finance department is using is out-of-date completely. Now finance team needs to migrate the DB to a cloud based application if the business is keep on scaling as per current rate. Finance team is looking for advise and help to migrate to cloud based solution.
  9. IT Asset Management : Keeping track of all IT related assets (hardware, software, devices and subscriptions) and managing the lifecycle of those assets from procurement to disposal.
  10. Example: IT Team has limited supply of the latest MacBook Pros, so they want to make sure the team that need the horsepower and whose laptops are about to go out of date, need to notify them.
  11. Knowledge Management : Effective management of information and knowledge like common resolutions to service requests, or instructions on how to set up a new laptop.
  12. Example: A lot of FAQs were piled up on how to download and install latest internal software update. Now the customers are looking for a KB article to follow along and not resolve each query individually, instead use the FAQ KB for that.
  13. Service Configuration Management : Capturing the information about different parts of the IT ecosystem - called Configuration Items (CIs)- and how those items relate to one another.
  14. Example: It is very difficult to deploy changes org wide/ in small scale without a map of how everything relates to one another. Thus needs more time to spent on mapping out the relationships between out critical systems and hardware so we can be more effective in the future.

The practice terms like "Service Request Management" can be both nouns - the name of a service area or team- and a verb and refer to the process of doing service request management.