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How to optimize IT service delivery
IT service management (ITSM) enables many other critical business functions, including service management and delivery for other teams. IT services delivery and management also directly affect the employee experience for every IT user in your company. How well your IT team delivers its services is critical to your business’s success and growth.
This article explains how to optimize IT service delivery, its difference from ITSM, and its importance. It then outlines the key components of IT service delivery, popular methods for performing it, and best practices for implementing it into your workflow
Try Jira Service Management to optimize IT service delivery at your company.
What is IT service delivery?
IT service delivery defines the processes your IT team employs to deliver IT services to users across the company. These processes address the specific needs of each group of users while complying with compatibility requirements for current systems and processes, cybersecurity, and other considerations.
Why is employee onboarding important?
Effective onboarding for new employees is crucial because it significantly impacts employee retention. Consider these facts:
A well-structured onboarding process gives new employees the right tools, training, and resources from day one. It allows you to create a positive first impression and shape a supportive work environment.
Effective employee onboarding also helps create a favorable employee experience and increases satisfaction. You can expect better performance and a more substantial commitment to the company from the employees.
IT service delivery vs. IT service management (ITSM)
Why is IT service delivery important?
IT service delivery directly affects your company’s overall performance and its ability to provide consistently high customer satisfaction. The criticality of IT resources makes IT service delivery a primary contributor to your company’s operational efficiency, agility, and competitive advantage. The better your IT service delivery, the more efficient and successful your business will be.
Key components of IT service delivery
Optimal IT service delivery includes several essential elements. Each plays a vital role in consistently achieving successful IT service management outcomes.
Service-level management
Service-level management is the processes an IT team uses to deliver IT services at levels that meet user expectations, business needs, and company goals. This requires IT and the teams it serves to collaborate and establish service-level agreements (SLAs), service-level objectives (SLOs), or both. These are clear, agreed-upon parameters that users can expect and IT commits to deliver.
Financial management
IT is one of a business’s largest recurring expenses. IT teams must budget and manage costs carefully to avoid overspending, incorrectly provisioned resources, and degradation of user and customer experiences. Superior IT service delivery requires optimal financial management, making your financial management team one of the most important constituencies your IT service delivery team serves.
Capacity management
Optimal IT service delivery is achievable and sustainable when IT maximizes capacity planning and management. Key performance indicators (KPIs) and historical data analysis can help improve capacity forecasting. Capacity planning must also account for seasonal fluctuations in demand and business growth plans, combining forecasting with accurate, comprehensive assessments of current capacities. This data informs decisions about IT service delivery resources.
Availability management
Consistent availability of IT services helps avoid severe business disruptions. IT service availability is the percentage of a chosen period a service is available, where no service can be available 100% of the time. For non-critical IT services, 99% availability, often expressed as “two nines,” may be acceptable. However, 1% downtime translates into more than seven hours lost each month.
Most critical IT services require the availability of at least three nines, or 99.9%, which translates into only approximately 43.5 lost minutes per month. The most vital IT services may require up to five nines of availability, resulting in just over five minutes of downtime per year.
Multiple initiatives can help achieve and sustain the availability levels that IT’s constituencies need. Examples include redundancy of critical IT infrastructure components, effective load balancing, comprehensive monitoring, rapid incident response processes, robust cybersecurity, and dedicated high-availability computing clusters.
Continuity management
Continuity is closely related to availability. If availability management is about making an IT service available, continuity management is about keeping it up and running, especially in the face of challenges and disruptions.
Your IT service management plans must include practices and resources to ensure service continuity. Depending on service criticality, these may include seamless failover to “hot” (immediately available) or “warm” (quickly made available) backup computing resources or backup power. This is in addition to efforts to achieve and sustain required levels of availability.
Types of IT service delivery
Your IT service delivery model describes your service’s design, delivery, and support. There are several ways to achieve these goals, including remote support from a central location, on-site support at service delivery locations, cloud-based support, and federated combinations of some or all.
Your company’s structure and culture, specific user needs and expectations, service complexity, and available budget all influence your choice. Evaluate your delivery choices based on service quality, cost-effectiveness, flexibility, scalability, risk levels, and business-specific requirements.
Best practices for effective IT service delivery
These proven best practices can help you optimize your IT service delivery:
Implement the ITIL framework
The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework is a compendium of best practices for ITSM. This framework also provides a consistent, step-by-step approach to IT service delivery that aligns with business objectives.
ITIL centers around five core stages of service creation, delivery, and management: strategy, design, transition (including delivery), operation, and continuous service improvement. The ITIL framework can help you craft and execute IT service delivery and management practices. These can improve service quality and user satisfaction, reduce costs, and help you align more closely with business needs and goals.
To integrate ITIL principles into your IT service delivery strategy, assess your current state. Focus on identifying gaps, challenges, and alignment with business objectives.
Choose a version of the ITIL framework that aligns with your company’s IT management maturity. Identify the IT services you offer, categorize each based on its value to the business, and craft an SLA (and SLOs where appropriate) for each. Select ITIL processes with high business value, tailor them to fit your business as closely as possible, and begin implementing them.
Conduct regular training
When onboarding new IT hires, include introductory training about your IT service delivery policies, practices, and tools. Ensure your team receives regular refreshers and training online, in person, or in a hybrid format. Work with your HR colleagues to choose and implement regular training for everyone involved in IT service delivery.
Utilize automation and tools
Achieving and sustaining effective and consistent IT service delivery is challenging but essential for your business's success. Automating repetitive or mundane tasks frees people from other projects while offering fewer errors at a lower cost.
Consider automating elements of incident management, incident communication, and incident response. These may include creating, categorizing, routing, and analyzing incident report tickets and updating incident and resolution information databases. Service request capture and management, deployment of new or updated services, and monitoring and testing of IT infrastructure elements are good candidates for automation.
Jira Service Management can aid in your IT service delivery and management efforts. The platform has multiple features that can help you manage your entire incident response lifecycle and improve all aspects of your IT service delivery and ITSM efforts.
Use Jira Service Management for effective service delivery
Jira Service Management can benefit your IT service delivery strategies, tactics, and efforts in multiple ways, automating routine tasks and streamlining workflows for greater efficiency.
It also fosters collaboration and knowledge sharing, making it easy to create, access, and manage knowledge bases, including an incident handbook. Gain insights into service patterns and trends that help you improve delivery, management, user and customer experiences, and satisfaction rates.
You can easily configure Jira Service Management to improve services delivery and management processes.
Begin by determining which ITIL processes you want to focus on, define your provided services catalog, and establish clear SLAs. Select and customize a service project template for each new service or update. Tailor relevant workflows to align with your service delivery processes, automate tasks and procedures as appropriate, and create user profiles and accounts.
Test everything and roll it out to your selected first adopters. Use their feedback and input to make necessary changes, create dashboards and reports that support your staff, and inform your stakeholders.
Try Jira Service Management to improve your IT services delivery.
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