How to deliver IT service excellence to your users
Today’s IT leaders have a host of responsibilities, but the need to deliver IT service comes out on top to keep their businesses thriving and successful.
Living+Breathing IT service excellence
As an IT leader, fulfilling the needs of your company’s users isn’t just a top priority, it’s the priority. Not only for you as an individual, but to your business.
It’s true that the focus of any organisation is to build a satisfied and loyal customer base who go on to become advocates for your brand and recommend its services.
However, in a digitally transformed world, another truth is more pertinent to you as in IT leader. And that is achieving customer satisfaction could not exist without a complex and synchronised ecosystem of people, processes and technology.
The end goal of which is a responsibility defining the role of today’s technology leaders – delivering IT service excellence. Leading your teams to achieve this requires a multitude of considerations, some of which we examine below.
Clients we have helped to deliver IT service excellence
Strategy: Set your sights on IT service excellence
Establishing an IT strategy is no longer about technology, tools and products. Rather, the focus has shifted on to people and services.
Single out your IT service strategy
An IT service strategy is your opportunity to define what you want to deliver to your users.
It’s about taking the knowledge and data you have on their needs and articulating this into a clear, interconnected set of actions to meet those requirements.
As a starting point, your IT service strategy needs to establish a set of fundamental factors.
You need to outline
- Who your users are
- What your users need and expect
- Which services you offer to them
From there you need to answer
- How does delivering these services contribute to business objectives?
- How will you deliver your services?
- Which people, culture, technologies and processes do you need to do this
Design the services you want to deliver
As an IT leader, you’re leading the task of shaping and driving your vision of optimal service delivery. This is no small task, so how should you approach defining, communicating and implementing your plans?
The answer lies in allocating more, rather than less, time to service design. This often-overlooked stage between strategy development and service transition holds many more benefits than its end goal of delighting users.
What should good service design achieve?
Defines your processes, ensuring roles are well-established and communicated
Factors in the training your people will need to do their best possible work
Avoids post-implementation changes to your processes
Reduces cost of ownership through holistic planning of processes and technology
Establishes an IT department that can scale with change and growth
Drives improvements through effective measurement and feedback systems
Turn to ITIL for reliable processes
In an industry that moves at speed with a heavy emphasis on innovation, a great deal of value, in the form of time and resource savings, lies in relying on tried-and-tested ITIL framework.
However, with a thirty-year development history, the ITIL framework now features 26 processes, eight of which lie under service design. Therefore, you’ll find it necessary to focus most on the parts you need to meet your goals.
Whatever other parts you borrow from ITIL, three of the most indispensable aspects of the framework are incident, problem and change management.
People and culture: Build an empowered IT team that wins
Often underappreciated, developing your team’s individual and collective skills and establishing a culture that they thrive in is a vital part of achieving IT service excellence.
Integrating the following into your processes and team culture can go a long way to establishing the collaborative and ambitious IT teams you aspire to oversee.
Communicate clearly and effectively
Most of us believe we communicate effectively, but the truth is, that is not always the case. Paying greater mind to this can go a long way to creating a more open and honest team culture in which everyone is clear about their roles and responsibilities
Clarify responsibilities
Knowing who has ownership of which tasks and establishing a responsibility matrix can go a long way to ensuring your processes are as smooth as possible and snags such as duplication of work are avoided
Smash silos
When working too much in isolation, people tend to shy from reaching out for help and making processes more efficient
Instil a user experience mindset
Thinking like the users they work alongside can help IT teams get to the heart of their circumstances, better understand their motivations and ultimately, offer them the best possible service
Place value on empathy
Empathy is a powerful but often underrated quality in technical roles. But introducing this into your people’s skillsets can add positively to a user’s experience and create cohesion between teams
Expect the same from your managed service provider
Can and should you expect the same standards from a managed service provider that you would instil in your own team? The answer is, absolutely.
When sourcing managed IT services, ask the questions that matter. Find out about their approach, their team culture, the frameworks they use and how they put these into practice Investigate their philosophies and approach to user empathy and request demonstrations of their processes.
Diligent managed service providers will be fully prepared and happy to walk you through this to offer the assurance you need. They should demonstrate how their approach aligns with your needs and ultimately, your businesses’ strategy.
Explore Managed Services content
Achieving IT service excellence is no simple task. We have a selection of handy blogs which uncover the answers to such questions as how to choose the right technology for your business and what is the role of ITIL within IT service management.
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Get into the detail of delivering IT service excellence
For a more in-depth look at these points and a fuller picture of what it takes to deliver IT service excellence within your business, download our free guide for ambitious IT leaders.
Our leader’s roadmap will take you through the things you need to think and know about to successfully define, communicate and implement a winning strategy.
Blog
How to choose the right technology for your business?
Today’s IT leaders wear many hats and have raft of responsibilities. Not least is navigating how to choose the right technology for your business. With multiple departments, user needs and processes to consider, this is no mean feat.
So, what do you, as an IT leader, need to consider ahead of making decisions on technology that could affect, not just a select few people or teams, but your business as a whole?
Blog
What is the role of ITIL within service management?
The tech industry moves at speed with a heavy emphasis on innovation. So, it’s hardly surprising that a great deal of value, in the form of time and resource savings, lies in relying on tried-and-tested ITIL framework.
We look at how this tried-and-tested framework is the natural starting point for of today’s IT leaders. Not only when it comes to developing your IT strategy but, importantly, when devising a roadmap to delivering IT service excellence.
Blog
How to build an IT team that wins
On a team level, culture can be a powerful concept central to establishing a successful and satisfied workforce. This presents an opportunity for IT leaders.
What kind of team environment you want your people to turn up for every day and what kind of values and practices you want to instil? We look at taking these ideas and developing them to build an empowered team dedicated to delivering IT service excellence.
How Content+Cloud can help
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