The role of ITSM people in a shift-left world

In previous blog posts I’ve been discussing the concept of shift-left in service and how we can enhance it by adding in self-service and collaboration. This might have left some of you wondering if shift-left leaves a significant role for the ITSM team.

The answer is an emphatic “yes”. While a shift-left strategy alters the role of ITSM, it doesn’t make it any less important – quite the opposite. Here are just a few of the ways shift-left can raise the profile of the team and make their jobs more worthwhile and rewarding:

• Staff are freed from the more mundane aspects of their jobs to focus on value-adding projects.

• The ITSM team has a vital role to play in making self-service and collaboration work, well beyond simply choosing and setting up the facilities. For example, analysts should monitor the discussions around IT so that user issues that cannot be solved by the community are promptly brought into the ITSM world and addressed by the service desk using established processes. Posting feedback on progress within the collaboration space will help users to appreciate the benefit of making collaboration their first port of call for self-service.

• The team should “own” the facilities and be encouraged to produce ideas for improving them based on user feedback and metrics.

Collaboration is for techies too
IT workers themselves can get all the same benefits from collaborative spaces that end-users can – and more. Instead of working in isolation on their assigned tasks, your technicians can identify people with relevant experience (who might in some companies be on the other side of the globe) and then solve problems in a virtual group.
Knowledge sharing is at least as relevant for your IT workers as for your end-users. Often, it can be made into a natural by-product of online interactions (for example, discussion threads that can be archived for later use). You can also set up specific initiatives to create shared knowledge, for example holding virtual meetings to brain-dump and record what a group of experts knows about a particular topic.

I hope that’s triggered some thoughts about how shift-left can enhance the relationship between ITSM and the rest of your organization. In my next blog post, the final one in this series, I’ll offer some tips for making self-service and collaboration work as well as possible.