Our Confession

This is our first blog for a while. We’ve tried to put this one off for a long time now, but we have a big confession to make.

We’ve been trying to hide it for a long time and to be honest it’s a bit embarrassing, but its time you all knew what’s really going on behind the scenes at the ITSM People (the Boss might not be happy we’re putting this blog out!).

The reality is that we are completely stuck in the past.

Yes you read that correctly, we are completely antiquated in the work that we do for the vast majority of our clients. Sure, we do some cutting-edge stuff, but most of what we do is not new, exciting, or even difficult. In fact, most of what we do is really quite boring and its generally things that we learned 20 years ago!

Yes, the team here have amassed a huge amount of experience and skills over the past 20 years or so, and of course they apply learnings from more recent updates to the all-important Service Management frameworks (such as the super important Guiding Principles in ITIL4!), but ultimately a lot of what we do is far from new or shiny, in many cases far from it.

As you’d probably expect we do help clients with some new shiny stuff, when it comes to integrating Product-centric teams with some of the really important ‘core’ ITSM practices where they need to work harmoniously, and where organisations are mature enough to be thinking about end-to-end value steams and so on, but that’s not where we spend most of our time.

In fact, most of our time is spent working on old, boring traditional ITIL Practices, or processes as we used to call them. Despite many of the enquiries that come in from clients asking us to help mature and optimise their Services and Operations to 'align with ITIL4', the stark reality is that many of our clients simply aren’t ready for that yet.

Nine times out of ten, the output of our initial assessments come down to a handful of practice areas that need some prioritised work, and in doing so we catapult them forward on on their optimisation journey. We see it time and time again and it really is amazing the impact we can have when we focus people’s efforts on the (often overlooked) stuff that really matters when it comes to stabilising services and helping create efficiencies to focus on the shiny stuff.

To expand on this further though, more often than not, a lot of the work that needs to be done isnt on those old traditional ‘processes’ themselves, but it's more about helping the people delivering them. Sometimes there’s tooling challenges of course, in fact tooling often plays a big part in hindering service excellence. But the people aspect is the part we spend a huge amount of time on (and to be honest we love this part!).

A lot of time we find that processes were written many years ago, and through staff changes, new tech, or the introduction of shiny things and ‘the need for speed’, we often find that people (at all levels!) forget the importance of some those more traditional practices like Incident, Problem, Service Catalogue, Knowledge Management and so on. However, this is where by re-educating and re-focusing the delivery teams (and sometimes users also), we can have an often-surprising impact on how services are delivered and on the downstream satisfaction levels of those users consuming the services.

The good news, despite it being deemed to be a bit boring (and often not what our clients think they need from us when they ask us for help), is that we’re pretty damn good at this stuff and can have a huge impact on ‘moving the dial’ of their maturity levels for them.

The reality is that whilst our clients think some of this old, antiquated stuff that came out in the 90s is a bit boring, we’re super nerdy and we love it. We know from many years of experience that if we can get the ‘boring old stuff’ right, then the rest really starts falling into place.

If you’d like to hear more about how we’ve helped many clients move the dial by simply focusing on the stuff we learned over 20 years ago, drop us a note and we can line up a chat with one of the team – hello@itsmpeople.co.uk

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Why Choose us as your ITSM Partner?

Highly skilled in all aspects of ITSM and we apply it in a pragmatic way

UK based but support clients ITSM projects across the globe

We are tool agnostic, so we act purely on your behalf

Cost effective consulting with options to suit all budgets

30 yrs experience and trusted by some of the largest UK brands

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What is ITSM?

Information Technology Service Management processes include a range of activities designed to deliver and support high-quality IT services for your business. These can include incident management, problem management, change management, and service-level management. Additionally, ITSM involves continuous enhancement processes to improve service delivery, increase efficiency and reduce costs. By adopting strong ITSM practices, your business can improve service quality, customer satisfaction and achieve greater alignment between IT and business objectives. This holistic approach ensures that IT services are effective and integrated with your overall business goals. As ITSM focuses on aligning IT services with your business’s needs, you can ensure that IT processes and services support and enhance business operations. This is achieved through a structured approach to managing IT services, guided by best practices and methodologies such as ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library). These models provide guidance on best practices for delivering and supporting technology and other enterprise services and can help companies align their capabilities with their business goals and strategic objectives.
What is ITIL and how does it underpin ITSM?

We adhere to the ITIL Framework in delivering our ITSM consultancy services. ITIL is a globally recognised set of best practices for ITSM that helps businesses provide consistent, high-quality IT services. By implementing ITIL processes and principles, we ensure that your IT operations are standardised, efficient and aligned with industry standards. ITIL4 is the latest version of ITIL, designed to help enterprises navigate the new technological era known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This version introduces a more flexible, modern approach to ITSM, emphasising its integration with other areas of business management.
What are the core practices and processes in ITSM?

Effective ITSM revolves around a number of processes. Whilst there are 34 practice areas in ITIL4, there are often a core set of practices that many of our clients are particularly interested in optimising. As understanding and implementing these processes can significantly enhance the performance and quality of IT services within your organisation. Incident Management Restores all service operations back to normal as soon as possible, minimising to lessen the impact on your operations. This process might involve logging, categorising, prioritising, and resolving incidents, ensuring which can help mitigate disruption to users and the business. Configuration Management Keeps an updated record of IT infrastructure - hardware, software, and network components - in a centralised configuration management database (CMDB). This database provides accurate data on configuration items (CIs) and their relationships. Change Management Ensures any changes to your IT services are controlled and coordinated. This process evaluates the impact of changes, approving them through a structured workflow, and ensuring successful implementation with minimal risk. Service level Management Defines, negotiates, and monitors service level agreements (SLAs) between the service provider and the customer. This process ensures that agreed-upon service quality and performance levels are consistently met. Asset Management Tracks and manages your IT assets throughout their lifecycle to ensure efficient use and cost control. You maintain an accurate inventory of hardware, software, and other IT resources through this. Problem Management Identifies, analyses and resolves the root causes of incidents. Proactively addressing underlying issues can prevent recurring incidents. This, in turn, provides improved system stability and reduced downtime. Request Management Handles the lifecycle of user service requests, such as access to applications, software installations or information enquiries. It ensures requests are managed efficiently to provide a streamlined approach that fulfils user needs and enhances satisfaction. Knowledge Management Captures, organises and shares knowledge to improve efficiency and support decision-making. By leveraging a centralised knowledge base, your IT teams can quickly resolve incidents and problems, and end-users can find the right solutions to common issues.
Why is ITSM important to organisations and their IT (and Enterprise) teams?

Implementing the right ITSM strategy and optimising your tooling can provide a range of benefits for your company, including: Improved Efficiency and Cost Savings By streamlining processes and automating routine tasks, ITSM can help your enterprise work more efficiently and reduce the time and resources required to deliver and support IT services. Good ITSM is a silent enabler of success across a range of organisational goals. Improved Compliance and Risk Management ITSM can help you ensure that your IT systems and processes comply with industry regulations and standards. It also ensures that you are effectively managing risks associated with your IT operations. This can help you avoid costly disruptions and legal consequences. Increased Productivity Effective ITSM practices can help your business prevent problems and fix them quickly if they do occur. This can help you lower costs—outages cost money—and increase productivity and employee satisfaction. Better Customer Satisfaction You can improve customer satisfaction and build stronger relationships by delivering high-quality IT services that meet customers' needs. Improved Service Quality ITSM ensures that IT services are delivered consistently and meet agreed-upon service levels, leading to higher customer satisfaction and better overall service quality. Business Continuity ITSM processes like incident and problem management ensure that disruptions are minimised and services are quickly restored to ensure business continuity. Strategic Alignment ITSM aligns IT services with business objectives, ensuring that technology initiatives support and drive business growth. This alignment helps you make informed decisions and prioritise projects that add the most value. Enhanced Collaboration ITSM promotes a collaborative environment where IT teams can work together more effectively, sharing knowledge and best practices to improve your delivery of services. Proactive problem-solving Through problem management and a proactive approach, ITSM helps your IT teams identify and address the root causes of incidents to prevent future issues and reduce downtime. Continuous Improvement ITSM encourages continuous monitoring and improvement of IT processes, allowing your IT teams to refine and enhance their service delivery regularly. Better Resource Management With ITSM, IT teams can manage resources more effectively, ensuring that personnel, technology, and budget are allocated optimally to support business requirements.
Do you provide ITSM tooling support and what tools do you specialise in?

The ITSM People are completely agnostic with ITSM tools and not tied to any vendors. Given the close relationship between ITSM related processes and ITSM tools, we often get involved in tool selection projects, or making recommendations on how to improve tools and get the best value from them. We work with tools such as ServiceNow, BMC, Jira, ManageEngine, Fresh, Halo and Xurrent.