Process improvements through self-service in ITSM – 5 clear steps

In the context of today's CosH topic specials provide an insight into the fascinating topic of the service catalog. The service catalog is an important tool that lists the recurring services agreed between service providers and service users. It provides a comprehensive overview of the service portfolio of your IT service providers and your IT department, which includes all services currently offered.

Why build a self-service portal?

"No! My users prefer to call our IT department," says an IT manager at a medium-sized company with 1,200 IT workstations. And he's not wrong – people generally tend to take the easier route.

Before I have to research and think about it myself, I'd rather ask someone else who knows. What he is wrong about, however, is that he lumps all users together. Because not every type of person is "the caller". Many people are happy to consider things for themselves, try them out or select and order them online.

For the "prefer to call" users, you don't need a self-service portal, they will hate it anyway. But for the others, it's a real improvement. They will be grateful to IT for the new possibilities.

The main objective is to relieve the service desk – or something else?

Many IT departments take a rather egomaniacal approach to the self-service goal. They have things in mind like: "Fewer calls that take me out of my work mentally – no emails that I have to convert into a ticket". Overall, the self-service portal consumes the time of the users and not the IT staff. At least in the ticket opening process.

But is it really just about saving time? We would also like to look at the topic from a different angle. We are talking about clarifying expectations of IT and vice versa, from IT to users. Standardization of response times, priorities, service content and availability.

This is the path to success that removes the actual "time-consuming" stress of IT and user dissatisfaction. The user reads exactly what he gets in the self-service portal. Train a service desk employee, who in most companies often performs several other tasks, to recite the following sentence for all IT services: "Mr. Meier, thank you for calling. I will now open a ticket for the SAP authorization system for you. Our SAP Access Rights administration colleagues will process your ticket within the next two hours and your ticket will be resolved in four hours at the latest. The four-eyes approval for your requested authorization will then take a maximum of 48 hours and I will call you again when your authorization has been set to inform you." There is practically no such thing. Hand on heart, who has ever heard such a sentence from their service desk employee? And even if they have, can they recite this sentence for all services in the IT service catalog?

Ok, so how do I make a service catalog?

Step 1:

Basically, you sit down with your team and brainstorm. Establish the following guidelines:

  • Only service requests that occur more than 20 times a year
  • All service requests that have to do with users or authorizations.
  • Only things that we can measure.

Now have headings for the services written on colorful post-its:

Step 2:

Examples are

  • Issue of a new complete IT workstation
  • Adding a group e-mail inbox or distribution list
  • Adding, removing a user from a distribution group
  • Request access authorization to file folder
  • Training for banking program 2 hours

You will see that within half an hour you will certainly find 50 services in a team.

Now you are entering the next round:

Step 3:

Write all 50 services in an Excel spreadsheet and add a row:

"What do we need to know from the service requester?"

Now have your team write down the questions. These will certainly vary from service to service. For smaller services, there may only be one quality question; for larger services, you will need some information.

Now give your team the task of adding another line to indicate how quickly this task can realistically be completed in the day-to-day business of IT. Call this line "Estimated solution time". Always proceed per service per line so that the human thought pattern always answers the same question.

Try to ensure that the first version of your services contains the following points in the service catalog:

  • Name of the service
  • Category of service (e.g. HR, Basis IT, SAP, etc.)
  • Service description: What does the service do and what exactly do you get from IT?
  • What questions need to be asked so that IT can provide the service?
  • Resolution time: by when can the user expect "it's done".

You already have 50 initial points that will make life easier for you and your users. Now make these services available in the self-service portal. Design forms that ask the questions for each service.

Note: We show here a very simplified form of an IT service catalog with instructions for the first steps

Step 4:

Communication and advertising on our own behalf

Everything new needs friends: so do the service catalog and the self-service portal. Why not ask about cooperation with your marketing department? A beautifully designed presentation that explains the added value for the individual certainly won't hurt. Communicate often and a lot, your users will thank you for it and you will gain greater acceptance.

Step 5:

Reporting meets with approval at C-level

The structured set-up of your IT services and the associated options for drawing KPIs from the ITSM system database also open up new possibilities for making the work of IT visible. Show your superiors where the money is going and create benchmarks to create a continuous improvement process. A regular high-level report also provides clarity at the top.

Conclusion:

Service catalogs need to be created and then provided via a self-service portal. At CosH, we provide most of our services via our own Workplace as Service platform. The advantage here is that, as a provider, we provide the service catalog for all IT workplace-related things. Customers can also create their own services. For larger environments with several thousand users, we use a comprehensive service management system from Manageengine. Here, more complex dependencies on the service catalog can be linked to users and devices. In any case, it must be said that the preparatory work from the five steps should be carried out, regardless of which software the self-service portal then maps for the users.

Author: Manuel Wagner, CEO CosH Consulting GmbH, February 2024