IT service management (ITSM) is the backbone of most enterprise IT organisations today. Service desk applications often de?ned IT support, with IT teams relying on ITSM to help manage almost every service they deliver to their colleagues and customers.

Delivering services shouldn’t be complex, but traditional ITSM tools aren’t keeping up with today’s pace of change. ITSM tools were developed in the 1980s when innovation was dictated by mainframes and 10Mbps networking speeds. Back then, enterprise organisations were simply trying to agree on common practices.

Today the pace of change has never been faster. Companies rise and fall based on their ability to deliver new technologies and services quickly, and Agile, Lean, and DevOps culture de?ned successful businesses.

New ITSM software solutions have emerged that improve collaboration, team communication, speed, and transparency. These software solutions not only support – but also foster DevOps processes. Today, Atlassian is a key enabler of transformation and modernisation efforts, with companies pushing to automate user-centric processes to improve customer, client, and employee satisfaction, while saving money and improving productivity with products like Jira Service Management.

The ITSM mindset is shifting

In this guide, you will learn an approach to ITSM that combines new IT industry standards and the principles of Agile and DevOps so you can focus on services that deliver business value. If you feel bogged down by heavy, old school ITSM tools, it may be time to switch.
We’ll deep dive into how Atlassian approaches modern ITSM with its suite of products.

ITSM and ITIL

ITIL is the most widely accepted framework for ITSM, focusing on practices for aligning IT services with business needs. ITIL can help organisations adapt to ongoing transformation and scale. The update to the ITIL standards, ITIL 4, represents a paradigm shift for IT teams.

It guides teams to a holistic, business and customer-value frame of reference, and encourages a more flexible approach based on how your team works. The ITIL 4 guiding principles promote collaboration, simplicity, feedback, and co-creation.

Value co-creation in ITIL 4 focuses on customer experience and interactive relationships. This notion allows and encourages a more active involvement from the customer in creating a value-rich experience. Previously, although providers could create services and deliver value, those organisations that only considered their own perspective would risk falling behind their competitors.

Instead, they need to understand the constantly shifting perspective of their customers.

Taking an agile and DevOps-oriented approach enables ITIL 4 practitioners to involve their customers throughout the process, from planning, designing and building to supporting and improving services through robust feedback mechanisms. This inclusive approach ensures the voice of the customer is present and involved throughout. Focusing on co-creating value makes sure that businesses concentrate on what their consumers really want, and the outcomes that their services support.

Convergence of DevOps and ITSM

In the IT industry, we often hear varying opinions around DevOps and ITSM. These concepts are typically pitched against each other as either/or decision, such as “we are either an ITIL or a DevOps house.”

The reality is that ITIL 4 is leading ITSM into the agile and DevOps era

The latest version of ITIL transitions from rigid policies and silos to transparency and communication. It removes walls between IT, coworkers, and customers.

ITIL helps teams work smarter and quicker, but also provides the required process and control. Modern, high-performing teams and organisations are starting to realise this and use elements of both.

Applying agile and DevOps principles to ITSM leads to collaborative service delivery and iterative service improvement. By harnessing the core principles of both ITIL and DevOps, your ITSM will transform from “doing things right” to “doing the right things.”

Check out my previous articles on ITIL certification training.

Atlassian modern ITSM software solutions

Atlassian has modernised ITSM to support DevOps organisations with changes in service desk, incident management, and stakeholder communication. Atlassian Jira Service Management, Opsgenie, and Statuspage are used by leading organisations to enable ITSM at DevOps speed.

Let’s take a look at these tools.

Jira Service Management

A collaborative service desk where you can easily receive, track, manage, and resolve requests from your team’s customers.

Jira Service Management has richer ITSM capabilities than its predecessor, enabling agile and DevOps processes with modern customer self-service and improved transparency.

IT and developer organisations can solve problems faster because they can link and track issues from inception to resolution across teams. Everyone has full visibility into the queue, and all the right experts can collaborate to solve issues faster. As a result, developers and IT staff have more time to focus on building better software and services.

Opsgenie

In addition to Jira Service Management’s key capabilities, OpsGenie’s functionality is now included by default within Jira Service Management Cloud. This cloud-based incident response platform empowers teams to plan for service disruptions and to stay in control during incidents.

By consolidating notification management into a single management system, Opsgenie improves communication by integrating applications such as Slack. Incident Status web pages can also be created automatically to fast-track stakeholder notifications about incident resolution progress and service health.

Statuspage

Statuspage provides a real-time online view of the current situation with all your services, alongside details on historic events, to help users grow their understanding of known problems during an incident in a self-service way.

As a result, Statuspage makes it easy for customers to understand what’s going on, with incidents prominently displayed at the top
of the page for visitors to see right when they arrive.

Unlocking high-velocity ITSM with Jira Service Management

As we well know, IT is in the midst of a transformation to build capabilities that enable the rapid delivery of high-quality services. Those old ways of working riddled with rigid and dated processes, disconnected tools, and siloed teams are preventing the flow of information needed to make teams perform at their very best.

Jira Service Management is the ITSM solution that unlocks teams to fulfill their high-velocity potential, offering business agility and delivering high value, fast. As a solution, it enables modern practices across request, incident, problem, change, asset, and configuration management, so teams can deliver value faster in a more collaborative and visible way. This streamlines collaboration between your teams, giving them more time to work on the tasks that deliver value.

The key capabilities that Jira Service Management provides enabling high-velocity ITSM include:

• Request Management – one centralised platform makes it easy for multiple teams to manage, route, and triage their work.
• Incident Management – robust alert and collaboration features bring your development and IT teams closer together to rapidly collaborate during incidents.
• Problem Management – the impact of incidents is minimised by grouping incidents to problems, root cause analysis, and workaround recordings.
• Change Enablement – IT operations teams can be empowered with richer information around changes in software development tools to aid better decision making and reduce risk.
• Knowledge Management – use Con?uence to foster team collaboration and provide a self-service knowledge base to resolve requests quickly.
• Configuration Management – minimise the downstream impact of change by getting full visibility and context into the infrastructure that supports critical applications.
• Asset Management – discover and track assets and resources to manage inventory efficiently, link directly to requests, and reduce costs.

Thanks to its rich capabilities, Jira Service Management empowers teams with practices that can be adapted with an open platform and streamlined workflows that brings dev and ops closer together.

Lean ITSM

When IT teams want to increase velocity, improve efficiencies, and minimise waste, applying a combination of ITIL and agile brings a much more pragmatic approach to ITSM. Jira Service Management, Opsgenie, and Statuspage help companies deliver modern ITSM by providing capabilities that fullfill the promise of agile and DevOps.

“Shift-left” with self-service

The ability to “shift-left” and deliver quality self-service is a top DevOps priority. Jira Service Management makes it simple to provide users with easy access to self-service, while simultaneously ensuring a greater level of visibility and collaboration across various functional areas and improved customer satisfaction.

From a single portal, users have access to every service desk project from a single global Help Centre. Knowledge base articles automatically shown to users when they are raising a request or searching on the Help Centre, combined with automation for requests where an agent cannot add value (like password resets).

Measure support service with KPIs

By using the in-built SLAs of Jira Service Management, it is possible to provide transparency on how an organisation is delivering their support services, and its performance, to involved parties and stakeholders.

A service desk offers guarantees around things like uptime, ?rst-call resolution, and time-to-recovery. KPIs are the specific metrics that track whether the IT service desk ful?lls these guarantees. Jira Service Management makes the guarantees transparent by graphing and sharing KPIs for metrics like SLA success rate, average time to resolution, and average cost.

Proactively communicate service disruptions

Communication is a core tenet of agile and DevOps, and crucial when IT systems fail and people cannot do their jobs. Statuspage reduces the noise and misunderstandings around disruptions by making it easy for everyone to see notifications for planned and unplanned incidents.

Simplification through integration and automation

Any service management solution should always be looking to simplify and improve service. Atlassian realised the importance of automation for IT teams and included it as a key capability in Jira Service Management.

One key approach is to make maximum use of the automation features built into Jira Service Management and the extensions provided in apps such as ScriptRunner.

Automations, such as those achieved by ScriptRunner, can go a long way to removing the di?culties of working with multiple tools, particularly when coupled with the use of ITTT (If This Then That) approaches.

One example is how Atlassian automates incident management processes with Opsgenie. With Opsgenie’s various bi-directional ITSM integrations, you can bring ITSM into the DevOps age.

The bi-directional hooks and shared data repositories between Opsgenie and other Atlassian tools such as Jira Service Management, Statuspage incident communication software and Con?uence collaboration tool allow data to be sent and processed both ways between Opsgenie and other applications.

As companies progress into problem and incident management capabilities, such integrations facilitate seamless transition to automated remediation steps and the creation of feedback loops for continuous process improvement.

Get started with modern ITSM

ITSM is entering an era of speed, agility, and collaboration. Companies are replacing classic ITSM solutions with modern variants based on ITIL, agile and DevOps processes. By promoting continuous flow, “shift left”/agile approaches to service management, and automated quality and monitoring, Atlassian can support organisations that are struggling to accelerate and modernise ITSM in support of DevOps. If you feel bogged down by heavy, old school ITSM tools, it may be time to switch.

Implementation with Adaptavist

The implementation or replacement of an ITSM solution is a major transformation initiative that affects every user in any IT organisation. Successful ITSM projects call for a considered, deliberate implementation of IT service delivery excellence and must take into account a variety of intangibles – which go way beyond just a competent technology solution. This is not achieved overnight, but rather as a series of cohesive, transitional steps to achieve a desired improvement. We recommend a strategic approach that consists of the following broad steps:

1. Pursuing the organisation’s main objectives behind ITSM transformation by taking into account the pain points and the existing state of its infrastructure and
2. Based on the above, establishing the organisation’s vision for the future and the ways and resources to effectively achieve This involves setting pragmatic short- and long-term goals that align with the overall needs of the business. You need to take into account where you want to see your business in a month, in a year, in ?ve years, and so on. Your goals comprise the roadmap that de?nes the future of your business.
3. Charting out an approach that is agile, made up of small incremental steps to move the project forward while delivering value at every step, leading everyone forward towards the project’s final vision.

Once the strategy is created, it becomes important to apply a continuous cycle of evaluation (and re-evaluation), architecture, deployment, and support of IT services. This will enable you to determine if the implementation is succeeding, or if you need to take a re-look at your existing strategies.

Organisations that wish to optimise IT infrastructure, business operations, and production often turn to consultants like Adaptavist, who dispatch IT service management experts to provide ITSM consulting, tool implementation, and managed services. As a leading Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner, we can accelerate your ITSM transformation by providing end-to-end solutions – from strategy and design to transition and operations with a focus on continual service enhancements. We show organisations how to apply agile practices to ITSM and deliver more value to the modern enterprise in support of their DevOps and digital transformation.

We help organisations transform to continuous change being their business as usual. We do this by supplying technology, providing advice, and delivering change through modern, interactive approaches to development, deployment, and application lifecycle management.

Adaptavist is Atlassian’s largest platinum partner, supporting more than half of the Fortune 500. We are uniquely placed to provide our experience, expertise, and insight to help your business.

Whether you want training for your team, to build a software platform for your company, or to automate your existing tooling, we can help you. If you want to unlock the full power of Atlassian and transform your business at scale, get in touch with our team today.