5 ITSM best practices for your service desk

Short for IT Service Management, ITSM is a set of systems and processes that organizations use to improve the way they manage IT services. ITSM focuses on aligning IT services with business goals and boosting customer satisfaction by making continuous improvements.

What are ITSM best practices and why do they matter?

An ITSM best practice is a recommendation on how to approach a task or process within ITSM. By definition, a best practice is more than just a gut feeling. ITSM best practices are based on experience, expert insights, or proven results.

When improving ITSM within your organization, it’s worth keeping best practices in mind for several reasons:

• Efficiency: Best practices provide a blueprint for processes and tasks, so you don’t have to start from scratch or waste time reinventing the wheel.

• Compliance: ITSM best practices are often based on industry standards, so you can be sure you’re meeting legal or regulatory requirements when it comes to IT.

• Continuous improvement: Most ITSM best practices are created with the philosophy of continuous improvement in mind. By implementing or borrowing best practices, your IT department can keep strengthening your service delivery as you go.

Fun fact: At TOPdesk, we’re such big fans of using ITSM best practices that even we coined a term for it: Best Practice Service Management, or BPSM for short. Check out our guide to BPSM here.

In short, ITSM best practices make your IT services more reliable, secure, and efficient. ITSM best practices give your service desk a strong foundation for iterative improvement or experimentation.

Whether you’re new to the world of ITSM or you’ve been working with it for years, here are 5 ITSM best practices that every service desk should be aware of:

ITSM best practice 1: Get a handle on your requests with Incident Management

Incident Management is a key ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) process, which focuses on fixing disruptions so that your organization’s operations can get back to normal as quickly as possible. For many IT departments, implementing Incident Management can be a first step towards delivering smoother, faster services.

Here are a few of our top tips for great Incident Management:

Log everything, smarter

Make sure you register every incident in one tool, no matter how urgent. Recording incidents doesn’t just make it easier to keep track of your requests — it can also provide crucial data for spotting trends and reporting on your service desk’s performance down the line.

With a clear overview of how your service desk is performing, you’ll be able to make improvements based on data, rather than guesswork. Take the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, for instance. Their monthly reports give managers insights on incident volumes and which kinds of tasks their agents spend the most time and effort on, so they can take a more targeted approach to allocating resources.

Curious about the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine’s ITSM journey? Check out the full story.

Invest in a knowledge base

Your knowledge base is where your IT service desk’s collective knowledge lives, organized and categorized. With the help of knowledge items, your service desk employees can quickly resolve incidents without having to ask for help. You can even make your knowledge base accessible to your end users, so they can find solutions to common issues themselves. As well as making end users more self-reliant, investing in Knowledge Management has been shown to cut resolution times by up to 20%.

Make sure that your service desk employees are recording information in a knowledge base whenever they resolve a new kind of incident, so your team doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time.

Want to know more about the practical benefits of Knowledge Management? Find out how Roots saved their IT team time and money by implementing a knowledge base.

Reduce your incoming incidents with Problem Management

While Incident Management is focused on addressing issues as and when they occur, Problem Management allows you to get to the root cause of your incidents. Think proactive rather than reactive. It's definitely an investment of time and resources — but you’ll save even more time and resources in the long run.

Discover our 5 Problem Management best practices in this blog.

ITSM best practice 2: Use IT frameworks — but don’t let them hold you back

Frameworks like ITIL make some helpful recommendations about IT service management. Your service desk should be closing calls on time, keeping communications consistent and making improvements based on customer feedback. These are great pillars to base your service delivery on. But to ensure ITIL works for your organization, you've got to be selective about which aspects of its guidelines you apply to your ITSM. Think about it: would it really be worth doubling your service desk's workload for the sake of adhering to ITIL guidelines, for example?

By taking a more agile approach and using ITIL as a framework rather than a set of rules, you can make sure it works for the unique requirements of your organization — without wasting unnecessary time and resources trying to follow it to the letter.

ITSM best practice 3: Automate recurring tasks

Recurring tasks are the bane of every IT professional’s existence. They take up a lot of time and effort, which could be spent on more rewarding, customer-focused work. According to a recent survey, 58% of organizations say their IT team spends more than 5 hours per week on recurring tasks — that’s more than 6.5 weeks per year. By automating simple, repetitive tasks like password resets, you won’t just save your service desk employees a headache. You’ll be saving a whole lot of time and money.

Just look at Canadian university uOttowa. With the help of TOPdesk, they managed to set up automatic ticket routing, putting an end to email ping-pong between service departments. The tool also provided them with a straightforward way to automate simple, repetitive service requests. In doing so, they managed to clear over 45,000 tickets (and counting) with zero service desk intervention, giving agents the time to work proactively to make service improvements.

Curious about how they did it? Read the full uOttowa story here to learn more.

ITSM best practice 4: Shift left and empower end users with self-service

Shifting left is all about bringing your service desk’s knowledge closer to your customers, to make them more self-reliant. With a Self-Service Portal (SSP), customers can log their own requests at any time, and check on the status of their request via the portal. And with a robust knowledge base at their fingertips, they can even find a solution to their issue without asking your service desk for help.

Take Wodonga TAFE, a further education college in Australia, for example. Before implementing TOPdesk, they were dealing with chaos — as IT Officer Jacob Chant puts it, “a mess of urgent requests and walk-ups", which created a massive backlog for the service desk. They decided to create a centralized self-service portal to be integrated across departments, from IT to marketing. The result? Staff and students who feel empowered to solve their own issues and a whopping 50% reduction in ticket resolution time.

ITSM best practice 5: Start small and iterate

When it comes to ITSM, having the right mindset is key. Too many IT departments shy away from making adjustments to their services because they think that, if they make a change, they have to do it all perfectly, right away. It's understandable — after all, making big changes can be scary. Not to mention costly.

But the knock-on effect of this approach to change is inertia, which leads to a lack of innovation, which makes keeping up with customer expectations and changing business needs almost impossible.

The solution? Start small. We recommend focusing on implementing the low-effort, high-impact changes first and going from there.

In practice, this could look like trying out the first version of a solution with a test group and adjusting based on feedback, as Collège Boréal did with TOPdesk’s Change Management module. They assembled a group of operators to act as end users requesting new cell phones. In doing so, they were able to test out the process, gather feedback, and make improvements along the way.

By taking an iterative approach to ITSM, you remove the pressure to get it right the first time. This, in turn, makes it easier for your team to innovate, adapt to changing business needs, and keep up with technological advances.

Ready to put ITSM best practices into action?

When it comes to making improvements to your services, you want a service management tool that works with you, not against you. TOPdesk’s ITSM tool is based on service management best practices, which means you can quickly create standard processes for the boring stuff, so your agents stop drowning in requests and start doing the work your end users will thank you for.

Our solution is fully aligned with ITIL and supports Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, and more, so getting started with these processes couldn’t be easier. And with advanced features to analyze and report on your service desk’s performance, TOPdesk is the ideal solution for service desks who want to make continual service improvements.