How Agile ITSM Can Help Companies Become More Customer-Centric?

With technology changing rapidly, most teams are upgrading to the latest systems and tools to meet the evolving needs of their customers and keep up with the pace of innovation. But managing these new assets or introducing changes to products and services demands a modern approach to service management. 

As agility becomes a key requirement in today’s fast-paced environment, Agile ITSM can help organizations implement changes quickly and address the needs of customers. 

Read on to learn the what, why, and how of Agile ITSM. 

Introduction to Agile ITSM

ITSM teams are under immense pressure to deliver proactive and rich service support.  

Responsible for meeting the growing demand for high-quality support experiences, these teams need to keep pace with today’s always-on world. Unfortunately, traditional ITSM processes and tools are not designed to keep up with the speed of change, hindering their ability to deliver quality responses to internal or customer issues. That’s where Agile ITSM helps.

Inspired by the Agile manifesto, Agile ITSM enables teams to learn faster, change faster, and deliver faster. Triggering a cultural change that strives for better communication and collaboration, it empowers them to take a customer-centric approach to solving problems. 

Like Agile, Agile ITSM favors:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools, so every team member can contribute unique value to the project and respond to business and customer needs.
• Working software over comprehensive documentation so that teams can deliver enhanced customer value and better business outcomes.
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation, so teams can focus on providing the level of satisfaction customers expect. 
• Responding to change over following a plan, so teams can be agile to changing technology, business, and market trends – without impacting stability or availability of services. 

The Need for Agile ITSM

While ITSM enables organizations to take a structured approach to service management, when combined with Agile, it improves the delivery of value to customers through speed, experimentation, and iteration. 

By allowing teams to tweak old process approaches in a way that conforms to the digital age, Agile thinking in the realm of ITSM helps to: 

Respond Quickly to Changing Market Conditions

Harnessing the power of Agile ITSM can help organizations deliver services that are responsive to ever-evolving customer needs while also being resilient to disruptions. Today, Agile ITSM is quickly becoming the basis for enhancing service management, enabling organizations to be highly adaptive and responsive to change. 

Drive Business Agility

With Agile ITSM, teams can take an extremely flexible approach to service management. For instance, by improving communication within the business, it can allow for the release of new features – earlier than planned – while also reviewing and reprioritizing improvements in response to changes in market or business conditions. 

Adapt to Evolving Customer Needs

Agile ITSM also helps teams in taking an agile approach to customer needs. Instead of sticking to rigid processes and tools, Agile ITSM empowers teams to make changes depending on customer feedback. It also allows teams to capitalize on opportunities that create more value instead of following a stringent process for service management. 

How Jira Service Management Enables Agile ITSM?

Jira Service Management or JSM offers business teams the capabilities to collaborate at high velocity. Using JSM, teams can swiftly respond to changes and deliver great customer and employee service experiences.

They can set up a service desk and continuously adapt at scale, enabling the delivery of excellent service experiences – without the complexity or cost of traditional ITSM solutions. 

Collaboration

JSM uses principles of Agile ITSM, enabling Dev and Operations teams to collaborate better on projects, thus improving the speed and quality of work. Using the tool, teams can prioritize critical tasks, eliminate manual effort, and deploy changes easily, thus delivering more customer impact. 

Since JSM provides an updated and complete audit trail for every change, businesses can easily and efficiently deploy changes while also managing risk.  

Incident and Change Management

JSM facilitates the efficient undertaking of incident and change management activities. Right from on-call scheduling to alerting, JSM ensures you never miss out on critical IT issues. Intelligent categorization capabilities make it easy for teams to take action and make smarter decisions about changes to services. 

Moreover, automated risk assessments, advanced approval workflows, and integrations with popular CI/CD tools make the delivery of changes quick and stress-free. 

Reporting

With outages and technical issues having a much bigger impact today, JSM empowers teams to quickly and successfully deal with such issues. Advanced out-of-the-box reporting capabilities ensure teams have all the information they need into metrics, right from service availability and uptime to MTTR, first call resolution rate, CSAT score, and more. 

These powerful and insightful reports can then be used to create detailed and highly visual dashboards, so businesses can monitor the status of incidents and requests, track SLA performance, and keep up with customer expectations. 

Visibility

With JSM, teams can get end-to-end visibility into ITSM processes and track work across the enterprise. Such visibility allows them to ingest data from other tools and link issues – thus enhancing their ability to act on contextual information to respond to requests, incidents, and changes. 

Continuous improvement

JSM also makes it possible for Agile ITSM teams to unlock a core quality of the Agile practice – continuous improvement. By improving collaboration between teams and continuously tracking key metrics across the ITSM lifecycle, JSM empowers teams to get their hands on the root cause of issues and work together to improve service quality and speed. 

Integration between other enterprise tools and systems ensures teams get much-needed support from other departments to drive high levels of customer satisfaction. 

Wrapping Up

As quality, agility, and speed to market take precedence in the ITSM lifecycle, organizations are constantly seeking ways to strike the right balance between them. Agile, when combined with ITSM, enables teams to deliver high-quality ITSM to customers and respond quickly to business and market changes. 

If you want to enable effective Agile ITSM across your organization, adopting the JSM tool is a great way to improve collaboration, enable efficient incident and change management, drive effective reporting, improve enterprise visibility, and drive continuous improvement across every stage of the ITSM lifecycle. 

Reach out to us to know more.