ITSM, an acronym for IT service management, denotes the concept of IT delivered as a service. It describes how IT teams manage the end-to-end delivery of IT services that include all the processes and activities to design, create, deliver, and support IT services to customers. A very simple scenario of ITSM could be the requisition and delivery of a desktop or a laptop.
A customer raises a requisition through a portal and fills out a ticket with all relevant information, which triggers a workflow. The ticket lands up in the IT team’s queue, where all the incoming requests are sorted and addressed according to importance. Finally, the cycle closes with the delivery of the system and closure of the ticket.
Who Is an ITSM Consultant?
There is a common misconception that ITSM is a basic IT Support, which is far from the truth. ITSM includes every kind of workplace technology from computers, and services, to business-critical software applications.
People or consultants ITSM who get into IT management consulting have years of work experience in the IT sector in various roles like software developer, network engineer, system administrator, or information security specialist.
However, an ITSM consultant does not necessarily need to have worked in IT. Rather in many cases, ITSM process consultants come from other industry sectors as well and use their transferable skills to help businesses with their IT needs. For instance, someone with a project management background may be extremely useful in helping a business plan and implement a new software development project.
ITSM has changed a lot in recent years shifting gear from just providing technology solutions to delivering business value to organizations. Given its increasing popularity and pertinence, acquiring training in ITSM is no longer just helpful but almost a prerequisite.
Fortunately, a vast range of ITSM training and certifications, even ITSM Training online are available which are very convenient to learn at your own pace. Irrespective of whether you are entirely new to it or are looking to enhance your existing skill sets. The right mix of technical know-how and soft skill is the key to success for any ITSM consultant. In this respect, it will be relevant to understand the difference between IT Service Management (ITSM) and Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL).
Typically, ITSM is the actual practice or professional discipline of providing or managing IT Operations as a service. Whereas ITIL is a bundle of practices that provide a framework and best practices for ITSM. Similar to ITSM, ITIL Certification online is available for those desiring to increase efficiency while reducing service management costs by following the ITIL processes.
What Does an ITSM Consultant Do?
Businesses may face several ITSM-related issues general or specific. ITSM consultant brings a structured approach to IT service management aligning IT with business goals, and standardizing the delivery of services based on budgets, resources, and results. It leads to efficiency and productivity gains, reduces costs and risks, improves the IT functioning of your entire organization and ultimately improves the customer experience.
Here is a roundup of the activities of an ITSM consultant:
- Bringing your company’s IT teams and development teams together by way of streamlined project management policies.
- Aligns your IT teams with business priorities tracked and measured through success metrics.
- Advances customer-centricity with self-service and better processes.
- Promotes cross-department collaboration.
- Empowers your IT teams with knowledge sharing and continuous improvement.
- Improving request coordination for a more efficient service.
- Improves request coordination, promotes quicker response to major incidents, and prevents future ones.
All these lead to decreased costs and better service.
How Our IT Service Management Consulting Works
As an ITSM consultant, our primary goal is to help you in improving your overall performance by optimizing the technologies you use. For this, we first assess your IT infrastructure and operations. Then we understand your specific goals and needs and make a customized plan of action for you.
Once this gets through our consults start working with you to implement the plan, monitor its progress and make necessary adjustments along the way.
IT management consulting as such is a highly collaborative process requiring close communication and coordination both, between you and us. We take immense care to do it right to yield maximum benefits for both of us.
How IT Service Management Consulting Works
IT management consulting as such is a highly collaborative process requiring both close communication and coordination, between the consultant, client and the related stakeholders to achieve the objective of improving the overall performance of the client’s IT landscape.
The only way to achieve this is a prior in-depth understanding of the client's business needs. Here is how typical activity flow occurs:
1. Initiation
This assesses the client’s IT operations, infrastructure, specific goals and needs to prepare a customized plan in alignment with the client’s business needs.
2. Development
Increasing dependency of a company on its IT department makes it imperative for the consultant to develop/customize the methods and tools to best serve the client’s particular business needs.
3. Implementation
Implementation is the real execution of the plan which could be ranging from a simple to a very complex process and may involve deploying new hardware and/or software systems or upgrading the existing ones. The steps usually include:
- Analyzing the requirements (as per the plan)
- Deployment
- Configuration
- Customization
- Testing
- Running
- Integrations of different systems
- User training
4. Monitoring / Controlling
This step is to track the actual performance with the planned activities and make necessary adjustments wherever required.
5. Optimization
This is showing proactively the best ways of meeting the technological and informational needs of the client organization to generate value sustainably.
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10 Tips for ITSM Consultants
Organizations are now appreciating that what they use as ITSM applies to other business functions as well like human resources, facilities, legal, security and external customer service and it is not just the ‘choose and use’ of any ITSM tool.
For selecting the right ITSM consultant here are a few tips that might help you choose the one that would best suit your business:
1. Clarification
If you are going for an ITSM project first understand what your needs are and what the ITSM consultant will deliver. ITSM is not just a lift-and-shift of an ITSM tool. It is impossible to buy ITSM off the shelf and do it in a few weeks and get results. However, you can get many small targeted, noticeable incremental improvements in a month.
2. Quantify the Benefits
Do not believe that ITSM is extremely beneficial and good for your company. You should be able to quantify the benefits and get a clear vision of how it will give you better, faster and cost-effective outcomes with measurable metrics to follow.
3. Recognize ITSM as a Business and Not an IT Project
Understand that ITSM comes as organizational change via technology change. Instead, it goes way beyond just implementing it in IT and other business functions to ultimately improve your business function, service delivery and service experience as well. It is not just getting a system up and running quickly as a new cure-all, but ITSM goodness takes time to mature.
4. Ensure You Get Benefits
You need to see if your ITSM is meeting its goals and if the business feels that it has received the value it was promised, what is the improvement plan for the current and the coming year. Lastly, whether you are happy with the service. Ensure that everything you share across your organization is going to deliver the expected and defined benefits.
5. ITSM Is Not Just ‘Implement and Forget.'
While your IT function could be proud of everything it has in ITSM, there are lots of things to be learned or practices to be followed from other business functions as well. For example, your external customer support’s investment in improving customer experience can be utilized to help improve internal employee experiences across all your internal business functions.
6. Get Help Whenever Required
Let us assume, your company has gone for enterprise service management for the first time which involves various business stakeholders bringing new ways of working. The smartest way to approach it is to look around to discover what is the best to do and what to avoid. You can start this with your ITSM tool vendor and their customers as well who are willing to share their experiences. They can also recommend good third-party consultants to help you reap the benefits as early as possible.
7. Ensure You Have the Right ITSM Tool
Although most ITSM tools are now designed to cater to multi-departmental use and are the most fit-for-purpose, there are survey respondents who think their current ITSM tool could not be used outside of IT function.
8. Start Small
Starting an ITSM project with a big bang could be difficult, complicated, elaborate and potentially risky. Focusing on the improvement of a single business function or the delivery of a few capabilities across multiple teams initially and scaling up gradually is the right way to go.
9. Define Different Support Level
In case you are talking about first, second or third levels of support you must define what these mean and communicate clearly.
10. Have a Clear Understanding of Problem Management
Problem management is not just a process but more of ownership. Give the right job to the right person. Know that a problem manager is partly an investigator or analyst, but it is a project manager who is the total and complete finisher.
Ready to enhance your Project planning skills and earn your certification? Our training for project management certification can help you achieve your goals. Enroll now and take the first step towards success!
Challenges ITSM Consultant Solve
The challenges ITSM consultants' shoulder for you are as follows:
1. Make IT Support Across Distributed Business Units Efficient
ITSM consultants do this by giving a single situational report on the IT infrastructure and processes across a distributed IT environment to speed up the IT support system.
2. Assess Your IT Employees’ Performance
They can help you with the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for your IT employees, assignment groups and regional units to help you visualize their performance trends and react to them positively.
3. Integration of Your Financial Management Function
ITSM consultants help you integrate your financial management into your ITSM so that you can have clear visibility into your IT service costs and their sources and whether they are staying within the allocated budget.
4. Design and Implement Problem and Event Management
Once ITSM specialists implement the Problem Management function your IT support will be able to analyze and stop the causes of similar incidents from occurring again. Even Event Management implementation by them can help your IT specialists monitor the health of your IT infrastructure, expose alarming events in them and prevent any accidental outages. Both Problem and Event management will enable you to achieve first-rate IT service availability and cost-effectiveness.
5. Solve ITSM Issues Due to Mergers and Acquisitions
Managing IT systems and processes post mergers and acquisitions could be daunting. But ITSM will help with importing companies, departments, users, groups, and locations into your instance so that you can manage things conveniently without hiccups. They can also manage migrations or integrations for you to create a balanced ITSM ecosystem.
6. Managing Multiple IT Service Vendors
Your ITSM solution may need to be integrated with your vendors’, configuring Service Level Management functionality and creating different task workflows for different vendors. The ITSM experts will do this for you so that you can successfully manage to work with your multiple vendors. By establishing systematic problem management your company can deal with the overlapping areas and pay extra attention to finding the root cause of the issues.
6. Making Vendor Assessment and Ranking Easy
The ITSM specialists can configure a vendor assessment functionality so that you can evaluate and rank your vendors easily in compliance with your company’s workflows. The result, you get a better monitoring system and deliver high-quality IT services to your users.
Conclusion
ITSM and service management principles can benefit your IT team and improve the functioning of your entire organization by leading to efficiency and productivity gains. However, it needs a structured approach aligning IT with the business goals, standardizing service delivery based on resources, budget and the aimed results. It reduces risks and costs and improves the customer experience. Those who are into this business or wish to pursue a career in ITSM will most definitely profit from taking some kind of training offline or online from any institute of repute. For instance, KnowledgeHut ITSM Training online could be worth going for.
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