How to Improve Your IT Service Management Process

Adopting Sound Principles for Improved Process

1. 
   Tackle particularly "unsolvable" problems with the Pareto Principle. In cases where you are unable to identify the root cause of service problems, divide the problem into smaller pieces. Use a divide and conquer strategy by recalling the Pareto Principle (which says that 80% of effects come from 20% of causes). Always consider People, Process, and Technology.

   1. People: Was this major outage caused due to the lack of a collaborative approach or a lack of knowledge among your people? Are they equipped to prevent this kind of outage?
   2. Process: Was this major outage caused due to too much process or a lack of process awareness among employees?
   3. Technology: Did you have the right set of tools to resolve the incident or not?
2. 
   Document solutions. Technical teams tend to show more enthusiasm to take the challenges and resolve issues quickly. One key missing thing here is that they neglect to document the resolution or fix that they have applied to resolve that major incidents. It's quite natural that some people feel too tired and burnt out on a given problem to document the solution.

   1. Unfortunately this causes major risk for industries in terms of business continuity when individuals move away. It becomes inevitable that companies need to invest their time and money on new/replacement employees who need to solve the same problem again and again. If solutions are documented, they can be used again efficiently, and even improved upon.
   2. Consider allocating one resource (a point person) who can document all the technical people's resolution activities as and when major incidents occurs.
3. 
   Work ahead of schedule. Consider setting up a dummy deadline and virtual delivery points for your team. If your teams are asked to deliver services/products prior to the actual required date, they'll have time to solve problems before the customer is expecting the final result.
4. 
   Provide service at speed of thought. Focus on efficiency and quick customer satisfaction. This can be easily implemented if you have the information available or knowledge available at your finger tips. Clients and customers will always be impressed "how fast your respond and how accurate your response is".