catalog

 

• a citation
• How can ITISM help SMEs simplify IT support services?
• Use ITSM to manage "chaotic" IT situation
• ITISM Implementation Plan
• Implement ITSM Help Desk
  • Event management
  • Problem management
  • Configuration Management Database (CMDB)
  • Change management
• overview
• thank

 

a citation :

 

First, let's meet Bob, who works in the IT department of a financial services company. When colleagues in the company encounter problems, they will call Bob and say, "Hi, Bob! I have a problem here. Can you help me solve it?". Bob is familiar with every employee in the company and their asset information, so Bob can solve these problems well. However, the company's business will develop and the number of employees will grow, which will be followed by more IT service requirements. Can Bob still provide excellent service support as before? Let's analyze whether ITIL help desk software can help Bob, and whether the IT help desk team that provides business support like Bob can provide high-quality and reliable IT services.

 

How can ITSM help SMEs simplify IT support services?

 

Definition of ITIL: ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is a best practice framework for managing IT operations and services. In order to manage the IT business environment more effectively, the British government formulated this framework system in the mid-1980s. ITIL's main purpose is to coordinate business and information technology. Its IT service support process can help organizations and institutions effectively manage software, hardware and human resources services to ensure that business can continue uninterrupted.

ITIL defines that the core function of IT services is to provide "uninterrupted and optimal services" for all users. It defines five processes, such as event management, problem management, configuration management, change management and release management, to meet the requirements of its core functions.

ITIL does not require enterprises and organizations to implement IT services in full accordance with its framework, but provides a free choice and combination of services, which is an important reason why ITIL is still able to adapt to enterprises of all sizes today. For small and medium-sized enterprises, what they need is a cost controllable IT service strategy. This feature of ITIL can help them find and implement reasonable and correct functional modules and reduce unnecessary additional expenses.

Here we introduce an illustration to describe how SMEs manage their IT environment by using ITIL based service support solutions. In view of the actual environment, the end user not only owns IT assets, but also has many non IT assets. The IT support team can or is required to be responsible for handling the relevant services of all these assets, and is required to provide services with high quality standards. We assume that the IT team has finally provided excellent support and that all components, such as IT assets, non IT assets and IT related infrastructure, are in excellent condition. As shown in the figure, all requests from users are classified as incidents and problems. Temporary solutions will be provided for such requests to ensure that operations and services will not be affected. At the same time, use problem management to help trace the root cause of the failure, and then eliminate the problem and related events through the change process. Through ITIL's event management, problem management and change management, IT support staff can ensure that all components are in the best state at all times and provide excellent services.

 

Use ITSM to manage "chaotic" IT situation

 

Most small and medium-sized enterprises start their IT support construction from email. With the expansion of enterprises and the growth of service requests, the service quality inevitably drops sharply. The IT support team enters the fireman mode, and they can only rush to solve the request to avoid service failure. Without the process system defined by ITSM, the IT team lost the vision of proactively identifying and solving problems before the business and services were affected.

ITSM provides a service framework for IT service support, or we can call it "common sense method". It can ensure that the root cause of each problem is analyzed, confirmed and solved, so as to prevent similar problems in the future.

Steps to implement ITSM:

• Set a clear, high-level goal for ITSM implementation
• Select event, problem, change and configuration management to build ITSM based service desk system

 

ITSM Implementation Plan

 

Before making an ITSM implementation plan, enterprises need to clarify the short-term and long-term goals of the plan, so that they can always focus on each link of the plan implementation and control the overall deployment.

Clarifying the following key points in the plan can help SMEs successfully implement ITIL:

• What are our expectations?
• Where are we now?
• Where are we going in the future?
• How can we get to where we want to go?
• Periodically review milestones to ensure that the organization can clearly follow the plan

Define your expectations	Define what you expect to achieve, This can help you define and refine your purpose and direction. For example: Provide the best and uninterrupted service at the lowest cost Keep the service running time above 99.9% Provide users with new services and upgrade service delivery to a new level
Where are we now	Develop a baseline statistical data of key performance indicators, And continuously track these data and their trends to measure KPIs For example: Total number of incoming calls Total number of solutions upon first incoming call Average service downtime (by week, month, quarter and year) New services introduced Service support personnel are assigned by level (such as L1, L2, L3) Total time consumed by service support personnel for problems of different levels
Where are we going in the future	Based on KPI statistics, formulate specific objectives to improve key performance and improve services. This can be seen as a short-term goal. For example: 40% reduction in incoming call service Increase the proportion of first call resolution by 20% Reduce frequent service interruptions
How can we get to where we want to go?	Select and implement processes in ITSM, To help achieve short-term goals. For example: Reduce call service by 40%. By implementing self-service portal, users can solve some common problems by themselves through the solutions on the portal Increase the proportion of first call solution by 20%. By deploying a help desk solution with asset management and network monitoring, help drill down and quickly solve problems
Review milestones and expectations	Review milestones and KPIs, Make sure you are moving in the desired direction. For example:  Define a time plan to check the impact of short-term goals on KPIs: Check the number of users logging into the self-service portal to help solve problems, and analyze whether this can reduce call support for L1 and L2 Check whether the first call resolution rate has increased Analyze the results of user satisfaction survey

 

Implement ITSM Help Desk

 

Enterprises can actively manage IT services and reduce service downtime by implementing the ITSM help desk. Let's assume that a financial service company has multiple business teams, and its personnel are distributed on multiple different floors. Each person has his own workstation to handle various transactions, and prints checks or transaction reports by sharing the printer resource pool. When they approve loans or issue financial reports for customers, they need to print various bills. At this time, once the workstation or printer fails, it will directly have a serious impact on the business. Let's take a look at how IT helpdesk personnel can identify and manage service requests, eliminate problems, and provide uninterrupted services by implementing ITIL helpdesk solutions.

 

fault management

 

When someone reports that he cannot use the printer, there may be many reasons why he cannot print. The service personnel need to ask accurate questions to quickly understand, identify and point out possible service problems. There are several possibilities.

Exact question	Is your machine configured with a printer? What is the name of the printer you are using? Is the printer driver working properly? Is the printer low on toner? Is the printer out of paper? Does the printer jam?
Accurate information	Requestor's information Requester's location and network configuration Workstation information Hardware and software information Printer status and details Network status and details
Correct answer	After the requester has provided all the information, the support personnel can have the following options to solve the problem for the requester Guide the requester to use another normal printer Reconfigure the printer Restore Printer

A fault is an event that occurs in a non-standard, normal operation, and can cause business interruption or service quality degradation.

In this example, only one user is unable to print, which only affects a single user and may not have a huge impact on the entire business. In terms of service quality, this event only reduces the level of service quality from excellent to good, so this event can be classified as failure event (or event).

 

Problem management

 

The failure event will not have a wide range of impact on office operations. In the above example, only one person was affected. However, if another person or a group of people make a request that cannot be printed, the service desk will have the second failure and the Nth request. At this point, through the preliminary troubleshooting of the knowledge base, if a similar single event points to a single point of failure, this kind of event can be classified as a problem, because it affects a group of employees and has a negative impact on the business. Support personnel must provide solutions to restore the level of quality of service. Through accurate questions and accurate information, the support team needs to analyze carefully. For example, if the problem is caused by the failure of the printer itself, it needs to be replaced in time to restore the normal operation to the affected users earlier.

problem	Solution
The printer is not configured	Configure printer/provide detailed steps for configuring printer
Printer problems	Provides detailed steps to replace toner, paper, or troubleshoot paper jams

The main purpose of problem management is to actively find the root cause of the problem and eliminate related failure events. Support personnel can configure and repair the workstation, or provide users with another printing method.

The purpose of problem management is to find out the root cause of the problem, solve the problem, eliminate the fault, and prevent similar fault events from happening again.

 

 

Configuration Management Database (CMDB)

 

CMDB is a set of integrated database, which contains the details of personnel, workstations, equipment, faults, problems, changes, components, etc. involved in the business. It also provides a public knowledge base containing known errors and solutions, which can help employees self search and solve minor failure events. It also provides support personnel with a private knowledge base to help them obtain the problem history, temporary solutions and temporary patches of all assets.

Details of requester	Name of requester Contact information of requester Requestor Location Associated priority Associated workstations and assets
Workstation Details	Workstation location Workstation type, manufacturer, vendor, and all request history Workstation hardware and software details Details of associated resource manifest
Associated assets	Associated asset information, such as printers, scanners, cameras Asset status, availability reports, and problem history

 

Change management

 

Now employees have got a solution for printing, but the problem still exists and points to the printer. The history of workstation and printer problems from CMDB shows that printers frequently fail. In order to eliminate this problem, a new printer needs to be replaced to restore the service. At this time, a change process needs to be started. For changes, the first thing to do is to make a proposal to replace the printer. According to the purchase cost, the IT manager or COO will approve the proposal. After the proposal is approved, prepare a detailed implementation plan. In order to ensure the safe and smooth implementation of the change, it is also necessary to develop a fallback plan. After the change is implemented, the requester confirms whether the change is successful.

stage	explain
Change Proposal	The change proposal is based on the information of the requester and the problem history report of the printer. Proposal is a necessary stage for change. It describes all the information about why the change is needed now
Change evaluation	Submit the change plan to the approver. The change plan should ensure that downtime is minimized. For example, if you install a new printer, you may need to reconfigure the printer settings on all machines. Support staff need to ensure that this change plan is implemented in non business hours to minimize the impact on the business
Execute Change	After approval, implement the change according to the change plan
Implementation result inspection	After the change implementation is completed, the approver checks the change to ensure that the change is successful. If the change fails, it needs to return to the status before the change. If successful, this stage can be approved
Close Change Request	When the requester confirms that the change can solve the problem, the change request can be closed

 

The enterprise can effectively and proactively handle service requests through the implementation of event, problem, configuration and change management processes to continuously ensure excellent service quality.

 

overview

 

With the continuous expansion of the IT business environment, growing small and medium-sized enterprises are often difficult to provide users with high-quality, uninterrupted IT services. Enterprises need to adopt a standardized solution to deal with various IT service transactions.

• ITSM can help IT support personnel control the IT environment and continuously provide quality services
• Enterprises need to adopt cost saving methods when implementing ITSM
• Cost saving methods can help SMEs plan and implement ITSM in the right way without losing their way in standardization
• Enterprises can select functional modules as needed to plan and implement ITIL, use event, problem, configuration and change management to proactively deal with problems, and maintain excellent service quality

Let's return to Bob. ITSM can help Bob manage IT services, no matter how large his IT environment will grow. It can help Bob and his team solve problems faster and even prevent problems from appearing.

 

thank

 

thank Javier Garcia Arcal Check and comment of.

As an independent senior ITIL consultant, he provides professional consulting services for large government and private enterprises in Spain. He and Nebrija University（ www.nebrija.com ）There is also cooperation, part-time teaching PMBOK (technical project management) related courses. With his rich experience in ITIL, Javier also works part-time as a trainer to help aspiring people take the I ITIL Foundation exam. So is he www.itlibrary.org and www.itilcommunity.com The main contributors of the forum. Available through javier.arcal@gmail.com Contact Javier Arcal.