As if growing customer demands and the rise of distributed teams didn’t present enough challenges for businesses, increased economic uncertainty has only added more pressure to generate efficiencies. Service management sits at the center of meeting customer expectations and optimizing resources, but only when implemented properly and supported by the right technology.

Legacy service management solutions have left organizations dealing with inflated costs, disconnected teams, and inefficient service delivery. To keep pace with the speed of business, organizations are looking to adopt Enterprise Service Management (ESM) practices. To do so, they must make the switch from legacy ITSM tools to more modern solutions that bring people and processes together.

Creating a Universal System of Connected Work

Named a Leader in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for IT Service Management Platforms, Jira Service Management (JSM) is Atlassian’s modern service management solution that unites development, IT operations, and business teams on an integrated platform to accelerate work, eliminate silos, and deliver high-velocity service experiences.

Jira Service Management is the fastest-growing ITSM product for the second year in a row, with over 45,000 customers leveraging the platform to power their organizations’ internal and external service delivery. The reason for such tremendous growth comes down to Atlassian’s substantial investments in the ITSM space – especially their recent acquisitions of tools like Insight, OpsGenie, ProForma, and Halp – making JSM a central hub for requests, incident reports, configuration, and asset management. 

Our recent whitepaper, Enterprise Service Management: A Core Pillar to Business Transformation, explores how Jira Service Management provides a platform for connected teams, improved visibility and accelerated workflows. It also presents quantifiable data on Jira Service Management’s financial impact. 

Implement ESM the Right Way

Like with most strategies, they look good on paper until it’s time to actually execute them. One of the main reasons businesses fail to extend ITSM capabilities beyond IT is because they’re trying to do so with an outdated legacy system.

To understand the negative impact of poorly executed ESM strategies, we explore examples of organizations big and small that addressed operational challenges with Jira Service Management. All of the organizations partnered with Praecipio to ensure that Jira Service Management was configured in a way that set them up for success with implementing ESM practices. 

How ACI Worldwide Saved $4 Million with Jira Service Management

ACI Worldwide, a global leader in mission-critical payment software, used a major Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform to implement ESM practices. Not only did this platform not align with the organization’s business needs, it generated massive overhead costs in licensing, maintenance and customizations. 

In order to standardize workflows and improve service delivery across the enterprise, ACI Worldwide made the switch from their legacy CRM platform to Jira Service Management. With over 4,000 employees in 34 countries and handling $14 trillion in transactions per day, the payment provider needed a platform that connected their distributed teams and could scale with their growing organization.

After completing the ESM implementation, the worldwide leading enterprise improved service delivery and operational efficiency across all departments, saving them $4 million in licensing fees year-over-year.

Modernizing Operations with a Nationally-Ranked Private University

Struggling with impossible-to-update legacy software and a scattered ticketing system, a nationally-ranked private university needed a modern service management solution that allowed them to track a variety of requests–from facilities to equipment–across the university. 

Their legacy ticketing system lacked reporting and search capabilities, and upgrading meant risking the entire system breaking down. Additionally, while tickets transferred from one queue to another, the information in their custom fields did not. Investing in upgrading their legacy system just didn’t make sense financially.. 

After evaluating various service management tools, they ultimately decided on the flexible, user-friendly Jira Service Management because of its superior UX and endless customization options. 

Service requesters enjoyed Jira Service Management’s easy-to-use interface and service teams appreciated how workflows were streamlined with dashboards and queues created to optimize prioritization and organization. 

Enabling Faster Innovation at Crocs

When world-famous shoemaker Crocs sought to improve its innovation workflows, they turned to Jira Service Management. 

Previously, Crocs used Google Forms to provide a product-intake channel where anyone on the team could submit innovation ideas or report bugs. The product manager would then review these inputs and create Jira tickets for the development teams, but this manual process slowed down the innovation process. 

After implementing Jira Service Management, the process between ideation and development moved faster. Simultaneously, now that project managers were able to track tickets, they could quickly gain valuable insight into workflows and were able to focus on more high-priority tasks. 

Small Team, Big Results With Jira Service Management

A local utility company was struggling to meet SLAs and implement an asset management strategy that supported their long-term vision. Not only did they have a small-but-mighty team servicing the entire organization, they used several disparate tools to manage and track service requests, incidents, employee onboarding/offboarding issues, and computer inventory.

After considering different service management platforms, they decided to go with Jira Service Management because of the tool’s ability to provide teams with a single source of truth and enable seamless service experiences.

The utility provider implemented a pre-defined framework based on ITIL best practices with the support of Jira Service Management, and this resulted in streamlined processes and improved SLAs.

How the World’s Largest Beverage and Brewing Company Got Rid of Excel Spreadsheets

Operating on a legacy service desk, the world’s largest beverage and brewing company struggled to keep up with increasing ticket volume, meet SLAs and triage incoming work. The legacy system also did not offer self-service options to support customers, retail and distribution vendors, or employees. 

Additionally, the beverage company managed their resources with spreadsheets and different databases, an impossible feat with over 30,000 employees and more than one million company assets to keep track of. 

To overcome these challenges and properly implement ESM best practices, the beverage corporation turned to Jira Service Management. Atlassian’s powerful service management platform provided the multinational company with a self-service portal and knowledge base capabilities needed to automate processes and improve service levels.

Jira Service Management also supported 750 agents and 20,000 users in delivering high-velocity service experiences when handling more than 4,000 daily service requests. With JSM, the organization was able to effectively manage and make better decisions regarding their company assets.

How Can My Organization Adopt ESM Practices?

Legacy systems have fallen behind the demands of today’s hyper-competitive and uncertain business environment. These outdated technologies no longer serve organizations looking to modernize ways of working, optimize resources, and put the service experience at the forefront of their operations. 

As an Atlassian Platinum Solution partner, Praecipio has helped hundreds of organizations–from small startups to Fortune 5 companies– improve visibility and connectivity with our Jira Service Management implementations. We tailor Jira Service Management to work for your organization by combining ideal ESM practices with custom configurations that enable your teams to focus on the work that matters most. 

Ready to start your journey with Jira Service Management? Contact us to learn how your small team can get 10 Jira Service Management agents at no cost for a year, or if you form part of a large organization, how you can get 30% off your first year of a Jira Service Management license agreement. No matter the size of your company, Praecipio can help your organization leverage ITSM capabilities across the entire organization. 

One of the biggest shifts in IT service management (ITSM) over the last half-decade has been the push for Enterprise Service Management (ESM), where proven ITSM capabilities are extended to other parts of the organization to improve operations and outcomes. You can read more about the benefits of enterprise service management here.

There have undeniably been great successes in many ESM strategies to date. That said, there’s one thing still holding it back — its name.

What’s wrong with “enterprise service management”?

The name makes sense, right? Right!

Well…

To a certain point, at least.

ESM is the use of ITSM capabilities across the enterprise, so “enterprise service management” is an easy sell to those who know what it means. However, that group may be smaller than some might expect, which is where the pushback starts.

Enterprise service management is unknown outside of IT

“Enterprise” is, simply put, an IT-way to refer to the organization as a whole. It’s not something that has caught on quite as much in all other departments, though, especially those where “enterprise” already has a separate, distinct meaning. This can make pitching ESM tough, as its success hinges on other business functions buying into it.

Ultimately, the business functions that are seeking help to improve their operations and outcomes aren’t looking for “enterprise” service management. Instead, they’re looking for digital transformation and a quick-and-easy way to introduce much-needed digital workflows to their operations.

An individual in human resources (HR) may not have read or heard about HR’s need for “ESM”. What they will have been subject to, though, is a constant push to “digitally transform HR operations” and that “new ways of working demand digital workflows.” This messaging is most likely coming from both external and internal sources, too, meaning the recipient is often very familiar with it. 

This is why it’s time to talk to potential customers of ESM in the language that they’re expecting — and wanting — to hear.

Let’s not underestimate the critical business need for digital workflows

Your organization and its many business functions, having so far weathered the storm of the global pandemic (and its commercial and operational impact), are likely looking for a solution to support new ways of working. For many, the need for this solution has doubtlessly been accelerated by now-distributed, rather than centrally-located, employees and teams.

For any business function needing help with issues or opportunities such as:

• The inefficiencies and failures of its manual operations
• Missing enablement elements such as self-help tools and knowledge management
• The workflow and working issues caused by remote working
• The lack of insight into demand, performance, service quality, and outcome delivery.

It’s time to think beyond “enterprise service management” and speak about the ready-made solutions to these needs using terms that non-IT personnel will know and understand.

These business functions, teams, and employees all need the power of digital workflows and everything that can come with them. Things like rules-based and AI-assisted automation, self-service catalogs and chatbots, knowledge management, notifications and alerts, platform-based bespoke workflow/app creation, and other capabilities that are readily available and extensible in modern ITSM tools will help to vault your functions and teams to the level needed — if you can get each to buy in. Check out this blog to learn how to create buy-in with teams in other departments.

Let’s talk about enabling digital workflows going forward

None of this diminishes the opportunity and power of “ESM” — it just comes down to how the solution is sold. It’s time to start packaging it as “digital workflows” or “digital enablement” instead, selling the power of ESM to other business functions using the language they expect (and perhaps want and need). This will ultimately be an easier way of helping each improve their operations and outcomes. Check out this eBook to learn about ESM use cases for diverse business teams including HR, Legal, Operations, Marketing, and Sales.

If your organization and its business functions need fast access to flexible digital workflows, then let's connect.

Enterprise Service Management (ESM) demonstrates how broadly applicable the processes and frameworks behind service management are. Although the principles were initially developed for IT, the scope of service management has widened considerably. 

The right ESM implementation should further business goals, enhance customer experience, and even improve employee satisfaction. A survey of 500 C-Suite professionals found that 72 percent of business leaders felt that cross-department collaboration benefits employee engagement and experience. With ESM tools reducing silos within organizations and creating a collaborative ecosystem of tools and workflows, organizations have a unique opportunity to improve their operations holistically. 

What a Successful ESM Implementation Looks Like

To create an effective ESM strategy, you first need to look at your existing processes to determine what should be refined. Tools from the Atlassian platform can help you achieve your goals of implementing ESM best practices, whether you’re trying to improve the efficiency of a single department by providing a modern service desk or improve the collaborative capacity of the entire enterprise through communication and project management tools. The combination of ESM principles and Atlassian tools can help you achieve your business goals.

Moving Into the Future 

For example, when one of the world’s largest legal and business news providers turned to Praecipio Consulting to help them remove silos in their organization and transition from outdated tools and antiquated workflows. By implementing the full Atlassian platform, this organization standardized tools and practices across teams and projects, gained better performance insights, and provided developers with integration to code repositories. 

With the help of a Jira and Confluence, this organization defined standardized processes that also accounted for the unique workflow needs of different teams. Praecipio Consulting leveraged Jira’s custom fields to meet the needs of individual workflows while also providing a standard for cross-project collaboration that keeps everyone on the same page.

From Ideation to Execution with ESM 

When world-famous shoemaker Crocs sought to improve its innovation workflows, they turned to Jira Service Management. Praecipio Consulting helped Crocs replace their outdated method of creating tickets via Google Forms by implementing  Jira Service Management (JSM), which automatically routed incoming innovation ideas and bug reports to the appropriate channels based on the request type. 

Making the change to Jira Service Management enabled teams responsible for evaluating suggestions and implementing changes to quickly take a holistic view of new ideas via a simplified Jira interface. It removed the need to manually assign tickets and enabled employees to focus on more high-priority activities. Simultaneously, project managers were able to track tickets and gain valuable insights into workflows quickly.

Unique Challenges Demand Unique Solutions

When a major enterprise in the digital payments space decided to make the switch from their legacy Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform to a modern ITSM solution, some major challenges involving their operations were brought to light. With over 4,000 employees working in  34 countries and handling $14 trillion in transactions per day, this organization required a robust tool capable of operating on a massive scale and across diverse business teams — all while still being able to support the unique nuances of individual workflows.

They decided to partner with Praecipio Consulting to guide them through the process of implementing ESM strategies. Our team quickly identified that the organization lacked consistency across different teams since each of them had a unique way of working. To address this challenge, we implemented ESM best practices in combination with dynamic Atlassian like Jira, Confluence, and Jira Service Management. This enabled all departments standardize workflows, templates, data reporting, and processes, which improved service delivery across the enterprise.

We also worked closely with different teams to understand the unique needs of their workflows and created distinct custom fields and data reporting methodologies tailored to each department. Additionally, Praecipio Consulting assisted with establishing a universal language to improve interdepartmental collaboration and closely align teams with overall business goals.

After completing the ESM implementation, the worldwide leading enterprise experienced simplified workflows and operational efficiency across all departments, saving them $4 million in licensing fees year-over-year.

What Can ESM Do for Your Organization?

Curious about how your organization could benefit from an ESM implementation? Contact Praecipio today to learn more about how we could support your business with a custom ESM deployment. 

You need effective communication across your organization’s departments to boost productivity and service delivery. Managing workflows, operations, and complaints in a growing workforce can be challenging, especially when dealing with siloed teams. Rooted in IT Service Management (ITSM) principles, Enterprise service management (ESM) is one of the most effective frameworks for managing collaboration and improving efficiency across IT and non-IT workflows. 

The Service Desk Institute found that in 2021, 68 percent of organizations employed ESM strategies and that 80 percent of those organizations accelerated their digital transformation in 2020 with the help of ESM processes and tools. This widespread use of ESM is driven by its ability to manage and encourage corporate collaboration by providing an efficient portal for real-time communication and resource monitoring — ultimately boosting productivity.

Benefits of Adopting ESM in Your Business 

There are numerous advantages to adopting ESM, but today, we’ll discuss five of these benefits.

Reduce Operational Costs

Having many support personnel on the payroll will inflate the cost of running your business. ESM has incorporated tools like chatbots, virtual assistants, and smart analytics to significantly reduce the number of staff required to manage employee and customer issues. Additionally, automation can reduce maintenance and training costs by making workflows more efficient.

Improve Customer Experience

Satisfied customers are the key to meeting business objectives. One way to improve customer experience is by offering fast and real-time responses to inquiries. It’s difficult to guarantee a fast response time when your company is over-dependent on human interaction. 

ESM technologies use artificial intelligence (AI) to handle basic customer inquiries and complaints, helping to ensure that no customer issues are missed and that customers have access to support when they need it. Additionally, using ESM can help to ensure that all of your teams play an active role in delivering value to your customers and that the customer experience is treated as a top priority across your organization.

Improve Department Efficiency

When the departments in your company operate efficiently, the overall productivity of the enterprise increases. ESM provides effective collaborative and communication tools that can be used among departments, reducing or eliminating the need to manually print and distribute memos or reports.

 ESM also helps in task monitoring to keep up with project specifications and due dates. You can use project management tools backed by automation to handle corporate tasks, including scheduling and resource monitoring. This can greatly reduce unnecessary human errors and oversights and minimize the time and financial investment in performing repetitive, manual management tasks.

Reduce Siloing 

ESM helps to reduce or eliminate siloing among teams in an enterprise. One of the leading causes of overall low productivity and performance in the enterprise is poor interaction among team members. When teams work independently vs. collaboratively, status reports may not always be communicated, and business objectives could hold different weights — or shift entirely — from team to team.

ESM offers a fast and efficient interaction among unit members. Using a central line of communication helps different teams interact with each other and offers a space to share relevant documents, analyses, and workflows. Plus, our experience shows that employees like working collaboratively within a single system.

Improved Incident Management

Managing emergencies and unexpected challenges is difficult, but it’s easier when you apply ESM capabilities. ESM tools like Jira Service Management have AI-enabled capabilities and automation incorporated into the management processes. This means that incidents are quickly flagged and the appropriate mitigation protocols are initiated.

As the management and structure of enterprises continue to evolve, more and more companies are jumping on the modern business management approach and setting up enterprise service management (ESM) platforms. In fact, a 2021 industry survey found that most businesses use IT service management (ITSM)  practices outside of their IT department. 

With more innovation and technology come novel business models, new workflows, and an expansion in staffing. While this expansion is exciting, new challenges arise when it comes to cross-departmental collaboration, as teams run the risk of trapping themselves in silos. According to a 2021 report of aggregated data from 4,200 organizations around the globe, ITSM helped teams adapt to remote work, enabling them to resolve tickets 23 percent faster while working away from the office. 

Atlassian’s Jira Service Management (JSM) is an ITSM solution that streamlines workflows and enhances the collaboration of developers, IT operators, and other departments within a modern organization. While initially oriented toward ITSM and DevOps practices, JSM has grown into a powerful solution for implementing ESM strategies as well. ESM empowers every employee — regardless of whether they work in IT — with the right tools to communicate and collaborate.

Managing Work with Atlassian’s Jira Service Management

Atlassian released JSM in 2020 as an improvement to traditional service desks. With more ITSM functions to help departments of all shapes and sizes, JSM takes the concept of service desks to the next level. 

Traditionally, service desks are the point of contact between a service provider (IT department) and the service user (employees seeking IT help). The implementation of ITSM principles makes it possible to offer IT as a service, creating a streamlined process that enhances the user experience, regardless of the service user’s level of tech knowledge. 

IT service aside, Atlassian’s JSM solution also enhances DevOps workflows by allowing continuous feedback between the production team and customers throughout the entire development lifecycle. With automation and an open communication channel, JSM empowers DevOps teams by managing support tickets, client reviews, and incident reports all in one place. 

Applying these ITSM techniques to the rest of the business structure and using ESM throughout the company are fundamental to modern multi-departmental businesses. Fortunately, Atlassian’s JSM solution provides a single platform for ITSM and ESM capabilities. Let’s look at some core features and explore how they help you enhance productivity, visibility, and quality of service.   

Request Management

JSM enables you to manage requests by consolidating data from emails, messaging apps, your service desk, and other mediums. Machine learning (ML) technology groups these requests into actionable categories for your team to process. ML can help workers respond to tasks up to 15 percent faster by using past data. 

JSM enables you to build an intuitive service desk that’s easy for your employees — even those with limited tech knowledge — to navigate and streamline requests to make them easier to handle. 

Atlassian’s JSM also offers a ready-to-use knowledge base to help you set up a self-service portal quickly and efficiently. This enables your employees and clients to get answers to commonly asked questions without going through a live agent, saving you time and resources. 

For example, consider how request management can benefit your human resources (HR) department. Instead of manually processing every leave and vacation request, your employees could submit their requests through the service desk and watch the approval status. Setting up this user-friendly ESM platform can improve your HR department’s efficiency, keep your employees informed and improve the employee experience. 

Incident Management

Atlassian’s JSM solution is a boon to incident management, covering everything from escalation to communication to analytics, helping make your DevOps teams’ lives easier. 

JSM mediates critical incidents by immediately notifying the correct teams to start working on resolutions. You can open chats using Slack or Microsoft Teams and set up video meetings to collaborate with your colleagues without leaving your ESM platform. Additionally, JSM enables you to link support tickets to the incidents, keeping everything organized on a consolidated platform. You can keep everyone on your team and your clients up to date about incidents with notification options such as email, SMS, and push notifications. 

JSM also provides detailed reports and analytics throughout the incident management process. With these reports, you can pinpoint the cause of incidents and keep track of your teams’ progress as they work to resolve them.

Suppose a system fails, leading to downtime that impacts the customer or employee experience. JSM facilitates the incident management process by centralizing and filtering alerts from monitoring, logging, and CI/CD tools. This ensures teams respond to issues quickly while avoiding alert fatigue. Additionally, you can customize on-call schedules, routing rules, and escalation policies to handle alerts differently based on their importance and origin.

Problem Management

JSM simplifies problem management by grouping related incidents to identify repetitive issues, helping you launch investigations to determine the root causes and assign the right people to fix problems. 

By providing a clear overview of the entire process and all the related incidents, JSM helps you find resolutions and minimizes any potential lasting consequences of the problem. Reports and analytics can also identify if any issues are recurring and where they start, ensuring you can tackle them at their roots. 

For example, your general operations team can benefit from JSM’s problem management ability. By grouping all the incidents into broader categories and providing you with reports to see the big picture, this platform can help you streamline your problem-solving processes throughout your organization.

Change Management

When it comes to developmental changes within your company, problems may arise as you shift your team members from one methodology to another. Atlassian’s JSM empowers your teams by providing risk assessments and managing approval workflows. 

JSM automation can score the risks of a change to determine the level of risk and whether it qualifies for automatic approval for implementation or requires escalation for review. You can also assign specialized authority to specific teams on the approval line, so everyone understands their responsibilities. Delegating specialized authority will, in turn, help you avoid bottlenecks during your change process.

For instance, JSM’s change management capabilities can help your IT operations team by providing change requests with full context about a change, the teams involved, and any related work. JSM delivers a single view of information about CI/CD tools, affected services, risk scores, and required approvers. By providing everything the team needs to know on one ESM platform, your IT operations team will always be able to make optimal decisions with clear ideas about the impacts of these decisions.

Asset Management

Atlassian’s JSM solution offers a flexible system to help your teams manage assets of all kinds. These can include everything from equipment to employees. 

JSM keeps track of inventory and data for auditing and organizes the details to help you make informed decisions to tackle incidents. Because all the data is directly in Jira, it’s easy for teams to access the information they need to manage, maintain, upgrade, or deploy any asset. 

While asset management is crucial for the IT department, other teams can also benefit. For example, HR can use this open database structure to keep track of all the employees within the enterprise and stay on top of each person’s salary, vacation dates, status, and more. 

Configuration Management

JSM supports configuration management by giving you complete visibility into your projects and assets. With dependency mapping, you get a clear picture of the entire project lifecycle to assess risks, resolve problems, and quickly get to the root cause of any discrepancies. And with JSM automation, you can also automate status updates, create new tickets based on changes, and add new assets.

For example, JSM’s configuration management can help you minimize change risks by giving developers a clear view of which configurations and services may be affected by the change. And if there are any problems, teams can address them quickly with the valuable insights provided, as JSM keeps track of all incidents and changes. Additionally, because all updates to configuration items are tracked automatically, JSM can save you a lot of time when audits come around. 

Knowledge Management

Atlassian’s JSM solution’s knowledge management capability provides a single source of knowledge, so your employees and clients retain near-immediate access to accurate, adequately documented information. 

By leveraging the power of Confluence, JSM encourages self-service by providing users with an easy-to-use access point to relevant instructions and articles in your database. Self-service empowers your teams to be more self-sufficient and saves your service team time. 

JSM’s machine learning algorithm also ensures that search results are specifically for your users. Additionally, JSM offers statistics to determine which articles solve the most problems and where there might be knowledge gaps you can fill.

For instance, consider your legal team’s applications of JSM and Confluence as an ESM solution. With a knowledge management platform that offers detailed articles on commonly asked legal questions, team members outside this department can stay informed and get their questions answered before contacting the legal department. If they do have to reach out to the legal team, JSM offers a self-service platform that enables clients to check the statuses of their legal requests without having to locate or take time away from their legal team members.

Conclusion

Atlassian’s JSM platform is a one-stop solution for your ITSM and ESM needs. Although Atlassian originally oriented JSM towards IT service management and DevOps practices, you can apply Jira Service Management’s capabilities to a wide variety of workflows throughout an organization. More than just a service desk, JSM has everything you need to help your teams manage their work and empower every department to provide a high-velocity service experience. 

From request management to knowledge management, it’s time to step into the future by implementing ITSM practices in every corner of your enterprise. Ready to leverage Atlassian’s JSM to support your ITSM and ESM strategies?

Reach out to Praecipio Consulting, an Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner, to learn how we can support you journey to unlocking the power of ITSM and ESM in your organization.

It’s no secret that happy customers mean better business. On average, a delighted customer contributes 2.6 times more revenue than a slightly satisfied customer, and up to 14 times more revenue than an unhappy customer. In the real world, 84 percent of companies that focused on enhancing and improving their customer service reported an increase in their bottom line. Making a conscious effort to ensure smooth and satisfying customer service experiences is well worth it for your enterprise. 

Providing great service experiences starts on the inside — happy employees mean happy customers. Businesses with engaged and satisfied workers outperform their competitors by up to 147 percent. Therefore, it’s essential to look at ways to set your teams up for success.

This is where Enterprise Service Management (ESM) and IT Service Management (ITSM) come in. ESM is the application of principles to all departments of an organization. Whereas traditionally, ITSM best practices were used solely by IT teams to provide service, ESM uses these strategies to empower every team. With a proper ESM platform, businesses can streamline their workflows in all departments and provide a better service experience for their customers. After all, productive and collaborative teams contribute directly to delivering better and faster service.

Built for all types of enterprises, Jira Service Management is Atlassian’s end-to-end service management solution that helps your teams set up efficient service desks, enhance process visibility, and break down the silos that tend to isolate different departments. With a vast selection of third-party applications and services, you can create and customize your service desk to fit your unique business model.

Simplifying Work Management

There are many components involved in setting up a cohesive work management system. Let’s take a look at a few examples.

Service Desks

Service desks connect service providers and users. In the traditional sense, service desks typically refer to the system in place to help customers. However, as discussed above, providing support to your employees and ensuring their satisfaction is just as important. So in the modern age, you can think of service desks in the context of ITSM and ESM. 

A service desk, in this case, refers to the point of contact between the employees (service seekers) and the IT team (service providers). The team provides many services, including:

• Incident management
• Service request management
• Knowledge management
• Self-service
• Reporting

These are just some of the solutions a service desk can offer, and yours will be unique to your business. However many you may employ, keep in mind the goal is to provide high-quality service for your employees so they can, in turn, provide an excellent service experience for your customers. 

Visibility

With so many teams working alongside each other with their own goals and processes, it is easy to lose track of the larger picture. That’s why setting up a system to give you and your teams a clear view of your projects and systems is so important. 

Visibility enables managers, team leads, and team members to quickly see the stages of various tasks and act accordingly to reach their goals. And having a clear view of where incidents may be and the status of each employee can help you develop solutions and implement actionable steps based on real-time data. 

Jira Service Management enables you to have a clear view of incidents by providing an open and collaborative platform. You can link and sync issues and service tickets in Jira and incorporate data from the wide selection of ITSM tools, giving every team a clear view of the processes within your company.

ITSM

The ongoing management and implementation of ITSM infrastructure is necessary for all modern businesses. The International Data Corporation (IDC)’s research shows that organizations that use ITSM practices to set up modern ESM platforms are consistently outperforming their competitors. 

They outperform rivals because modern service management systems streamline collaboration by facilitating efficient incident management and cross-departmental collaboration. As a result, businesses that implement these systems can better equip their employees, speed up their internal IT service turnaround times, and provide better customer service experiences. 

This is where Jira Service Management can help. Jira Service Management can set your business up for success because it is an end-to-end, fully functional, and customizable ITSM solution. Jira Service Management is your one-stop shop for all your ITSM needs, from asset management to advanced escalation processes to analytics and more. 

To fully adapt to your unique business structure, Jira Service Management offers many ITSM integrations. Let’s look at some of the top performers on the market:

ScriptRunner for Jira

ScriptRunner is at the top of the automation market. It’s an all-in-one solution to automate, customize, and extend your Jira functions. Using Groovy scripting, ScriptRunner enables you to automate bulk actions, build workflows, create scripted fields, and much more. 

Jira Misc Workflow Extensions (JMWE)

JMWE allows you to tailor your workflow to fit your unique work processes quickly. With a collection of 30 plus point-and-click post-functions, JMWE gives you the ability to build and automate your workflows without the need to know code. 

Email This Issue

Email This Issue lets you keep in touch with your fellow employees and customers without needing to use a separate email client. With Email This Issue, you can process emails, upload attachments, and send Jira issues easily to anyone inside or outside your team to facilitate clear and timely communication in every department. This streamlined communication solution is a great tool to improve the service experience of your clients. 

Time in Status

Time in Status helps you identify bottlenecks in your workplace. With so many departments managing multiple projects, it’s only natural for complications to arise. This integration enables you to identify problem areas by reporting how much time you spent on each issue, who’s responsible, and where the incident is stuck — allowing you to tackle obstacles quickly. Time in Status is valuable for preventing your employees from running in circles and ensuring an excellent service experience for your customers by promptly resolving their problems.

These are just some of the many ITSM integrations you can make with Jira Service Management. Check out the marketplace to find endless possibilities which can upgrade your ESM platform. Want to learn more about how ITSM practices deliver value faster? Download your copy of our eBook below.

How ITSM Drives Business Transformation

Download your guide to empowering teams & delivering value faster

Conclusion

Running a successful business means providing excellent service experiences for your customers. And that starts by empowering your teams with a good ESM platform. More than just a service desk, JSM has everything you need to help your teams manage their work and empower every department to provide a high-velocity service experience. 

From incident management and triaging service requests, it’s time to step into the future by implementing ITSM practices in every corner of your enterprise. Ready to leverage Atlassian’s JSM to support your ITSM and ESM strategies? Contact Praecipio, an Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner, to learn more.

Enterprise Service Management is a phrase continuing to pop up more and more as organizations look to refine their business strategies to improve efficiency and reduce costs.

Enterprise Service Management or ESM is the application of IT Service Management (ITSM) strategies, processes, and workflows to departments across the organization. ESM enables you to connect and empower your teams, streamline their operations, and track the progress of work (and ownership) in a more transparent manner.

ESM is the solution for handling the workday's inefficiency that comes along with departments working in silos, lack of governance, and accountability of who is responsible for what. And all those email requests that go back and forth trying to move an inquiry along the process. 

You might like: Why You Should be Using an Enterprise Service Management Tool

To take an enterprise approach, you can use a single platform such as Jira Service Management to standardize your process while allowing both customization and collaboration of departments.  For example, using the one platform, you can customize portals (service desks) for each department; utilize a single knowledge and information repository; track and report on outcomes, and automate routing and workflows.

Selling Enterprise Service Management

ITSM practices have been widely adopted by IT teams in organizations across the globe. But ESM is still a relatively new phrase for many businesses and organizations. Therefore, when trying to sell ESM to the Human Resources or Marketing teams, you must recognize their lack of familiarity with the terminology and processes.

Our blog on ‘Selling Enterprise Service Management to IT and Beyond’ illustrates the importance of focusing on outcomes rather than getting in the weeds with processes. Focusing on the needs of the individual business unit allows you to identify points of leverage and opportunity, resulting in a higher likelihood of acceptance and adoption.

Some Benefits of Enterprise Service Management

• Reduced operational costs and improved efficiency
• Workload reductions and self-service efficiencies
• Higher satisfaction with customer experience and service
• Increased governance and control
• Better collaboration within and across departments
• Maximize ROI on a corporate ITSM solution
• Process standardization

Which Departments can use ESM?

We have found that every department sees benefits when implementing ESM. The number of departments only limits the possibilities. Almost every business unit provides an internal or external service for the organization. 

• Customer Service: Proactively addressing issues and automating replies for standard requests, and providing a self-service option for customers.
• Human Resources (HR): Onboarding new employees, security checks and audits, handling departures, dealing with a request for PTO or leave, health plan or personnel changes
• Purchasing/Procurement: Processing purchase orders, building quotes, authorizing discounts and price adjustments, and communicating with vendors.
• Facilities/Building Services: Managing requests for repairs, office furniture assets, relocations, and general maintenance.
• Accounting and Finance: Approving expenses, sending invoices, tracking payments.
• Creative and marketing teams: Creating stock images and templates, applying product changes to the website, tracking social media content, deadlines for deliverables.
• Legal: Reviewing and approving documents, requests for standing contracts/forms, and certifying documents.
• Admin/General Admin: Request office supplies, manage couriers/delivery services, and schedule meeting rooms.
• Sales: Customer relationship management, pipeline management, etc.

Getting Started with ESM

Is your IT Department already using ITSM? How willing is your organization to adopt new software or processes? Are the existing pieces of software you’re capable of implementing ESM-type strategies? There are several questions you’ll have to ask.

Find a service management program with templates, workflows, and the knowledge to help guide you through the process. Some businesses do it themselves, and some partner with a company like Praecipio, which has 15+ years of experience assisting companies to implement these principles.

You might start with ITSM or build onto your existing ITSM with a product like Atlassian Jira Service Management. Click here to learn all about ESM at Atlassian. However, if you’re trying to do it yourself, make sure you avoid these common ESM tool mistakes.

We’re proud to have helped many companies, like yours, successfully implement ITSM or ESM throughout their organization. So, contact us to get started today.

Are you “penny wise, pound foolish? ”If you haven’t heard the phrase, it means that someone is careful with small sums of money but wasteful with large sums. Unfortunately, this situation happens when companies go through implementing and using an IT service management (ITSM) tool. Why? There are lots of places where a plan can get off track and end up costing your organization time and money.

This blog explains 4 mistakes your organization could make and how to avoid them. Additionally, it will help you avoid pitfalls where money is saved upfront in tool selection and implementation, but ongoing costs (including opportunity costs) are higher than necessary.

You might also like: ITSM, ESM, or SM? What is Service Management and How Can It Help?

Mistake #1: Not appreciating the total cost of ownership (TCO) of an ITSM tool

The critical thing here, whether using an ITSM tool for just ITSM or as part of a broader enterprise service management approach, is to appreciate that the “sticker price” of the tool is just a tiny part of the overall TCO. For example, there are also the:

• Implementation and set up costs, including process redesign, tool configuration, customization, and integrations
• Training costs
• Ongoing administration/management costs
• Ongoing support and maintenance costs (if an on-premises tool)
• The customer cost of upgrades, including changes to integrations.
• The impact of underestimating the TCO of an ITSM tool is that the above costs might not be sufficiently budgeted for with the associated activities minimized or omitted as a result.

One of the biggest mistakes we see is insufficient investment in tool implementation. Such that I’ll often state that “the best tools get bad reputations from bad implementations.” Failing to invest appropriately in tool implementation is likely to limit the usefulness of the delivered solution and the benefits realized.

Mistake #2: Making a tool decision based on price rather than value

This is an extension of Mistake #1, but given its importance, it deserves its own “time in the sun.” Here, choosing the cheapest possible tool that “does the job” might also bring with it additional ongoing costs that far outweigh the initial “sticker price” savings.

For example, an organization might not implement a tool to their specific needs to save money – installing a “vanilla” version. This then leads to the organization using the device to run counter to what it needs. Unnecessary costs are then incurred elsewhere, perhaps due to a lack of automation, and there are the opportunity costs of forgone capabilities (and the associated benefits).

Ultimately, the customer hasn’t spent the time entirely understanding the implications of implementing and then using the tool. Whereas engaging an experienced professional can keep organizations from stepping on easily avoidable implementation and cost, land mines.

Mistake #3: Not including enterprise service management needs into the tool selection process

Avoiding this mistake might also help your organization avoid Mistake #2 – with the various needs of enterprise service management and individual business functions helping to ensure that the selected tool has the required flexibility.

Notably, it’s about involving the relevant business stakeholders as early as possible in the requirements gathering/agreeing process. The IT organization shouldn’t be assuming what different business functions need from what will now be a pan-enterprise ITSM tool.

• Missing capabilities
• Difficulties in extending the solution to other business functions,
• Low adoption levels
• And more

Mistake #4: Sticking with an ITSM tool that’s unfit for enterprise service management

This one’s pretty simple to explain. It’s where – due to financial restrictions or the fear of change – an organization attempts to execute their enterprise service management strategy using an existing ITSM tool that’s unable to deliver against their needs.

It’s the proverbial “trying to fit a square peg in a round hole” – with it similar to the earlier mistakes in that your organization has an ITSM tool that can’t do what you need it to do. Or at least not without extra effort and costs. Here, even if ESM strategy execution is possible with the existing tool, it’s likely to be both suboptimal and more costly than it needs to be.

If you want to know more about avoiding these and the other common mistakes made when using your ITSM tool for enterprise service management, then reach out and talk to an expert.

Are you interested in enterprise service management but unsure how to generate buy-in from the rest of your organization? Then, we’ve got a blog for you here. Also, you can find 5 things to look for when selecting an enterprise service management tool here.

Last year 80% of organizations had accelerated their digital transformation strategies due to the pandemic (Source: 2021 State of Service Management Report). In addition, the rise of the remote-working employee, in particular, has necessitated the need to replace manually-reliant ways of working with digital workflows that better suit the parameters of distanced working. 

IT Teams across the globe have had to advance their adoption of digital-first practices and processes to enable as much of the global workforce to work from home. As a result, many of those teams have implemented ITSM (IT Service Management) practices and are beginning to use a similar framework across their organization: enterprise service management. Learn the 6 benefits of implementing enterprise service management or ESM tool.

Enterprise service management uses IT service management (ITSM) principles and capabilities (including the ITSM tool) by other business functions to improve operations, service, experience, and outcomes – offers a ready-made solution for this corporate need for digital workflows.

You might also be interested in ITSM, ESM, or SM? What is Service Management and How Can It Help?

So, how do you implement a tool historically used by IT across a broad and diverse organization?

Selling Enterprise Service Management to the Wider Business

An important thing to appreciate when selling enterprise service management to the broader business is that the name will not resonate with the business functions looking for digital workflows and perhaps more overall digital transformation capabilities to solve their pandemic-related challenges. Another is that the IT personnel selling the value of enterprise service management to business colleagues need to “stay out of the weeds” – focusing on the outcomes rather than the minutia of ITSM.

Focus on the needs of the individual business function(s). If valuable, these can be matched to specific enterprise service management benefits – that sit under the umbrella of “better, faster, cheaper” – such as:

• Optimized operations through best-practice digital workflows and other digital enablement capabilities
• Improved employee and customer experience and satisfaction
• Greater speed of operations and outcome delivery
• Increased employee productivity – for both service requesters and service providers
• Reduced costs – at both an operational and business level
• Increased agility and scalability – especially with automation reducing the reliance on manual operations
• Better meeting governance, compliance, and legal or regulatory requirements; plus, improved risk mitigation
• Greater insight into operations, services, experience, and outcomes, plus improvement opportunities 
• Amplified workflow benefits through the use of AI-enabled capabilities

Each of these benefits should be described in business function examples and terms, mapping to the business function needs to be provided—for example, the ability for HR personnel to collaboratively work on employee onboarding tasks while geographically distanced. For example, this blog shows how a legal team benefits from implementing enterprise service management. The above is a long and involved benefits list; it might be best to start with a punchy “What’s in it for you,” which could be your “elevator pitch” for enterprise service management. Then, hopefully, you’ll know what’s best to promote in the context of your organization and its challenges – with perhaps the need to tweak it slightly for each business function based on your knowledge of their specific requirements.

If you would like to learn more about the benefits of enterprise service management and how to best sell it within IT and the broader business, then reach out, and let’s start talking.

Corporate attorneys, paralegals, and legal teams bring tremendous business value to the organization. The nature of their work might be something of a mystery to the rest of their workplace, but they play an important role in defending companies from risk and trouble. If their work wasn’t already complex enough, add on a pandemic that scatters your teams to the wind, prevents in-person meetings, and even makes the courtroom process digital. You’re in for a bit of a headache if your processes aren’t digitized, which essentially means they aren’t effective in today’s landscape where the pandemic and distributed teams continue to be part of our day-to-day lives.

The presence of friction and bad processes can expose a company to risks and vulnerabilities they might not experience otherwise. Especially if they’re unprepared to handle emergency circumstances. Is your team as prepared as they need to be?

If this all seems familiar, and your legal team needs to add digital workflows and other optimization to its traditional working practices, then this blog can help. Let's discuss what can be delivered through the use of a Service Management approach to back-office digital transformation.

Is the Reliance on Manual Practices Hurting Your Legal Team?

Legal teams, like many other business functions, have operated for years using a hybrid of manual and email-based processes. It has worked, in some sense, because the work got done. However, the logistical impact of remote working has highlighted the many issues of manually-based operations, including delays and human error. These are some of the ways manual processes can negatively impact your legal team:

• Lack of clarity into staff workloads, progress against targets, future demand levels, and team performance
• The absence of automation creates more manual work, taking time away that could be spent on process improvements or other work
• Harder to build out practices and processes that are efficient and scalable as your organization grows and evolves

Learn what other organizations and teams think about Service Management and its importance in the workplace in our 2021 State of Service Management Report.

This lack of visibility into operations, service, experience, and outcomes makes it difficult to understand the true level of performance (in terms of success) and to identify key issues where improvements are needed.

Creating a Legal Digital Working Environment Using Service Management

Similar to how a Service Management approach supports the employee onboarding process, Service Management offers a variety of capabilities to legal teams that range from service design, through operations, to performance management and improvement. Here are some of the benefits your legal teams could experience by implementing a service management tool and practices.

• Digital work intake – rather than new work requests being submitted by paper or emailed forms, a legal self-service portal can be employed. The portal can also be used in conjunction with knowledge management for self-help. In addition, there’s 24/7 availability of legal self-help capabilities, including where employees want to check the status of their open legal requests.
• Leveraging focused digital workflows – with each designed to match particular needs relative to the work request type, the involved business function, or both. These employ automation where possible and benefit from service level targets, notifications, alerts, approvals, escalations, and associated reporting and analytics to optimize performance. 
• More-effective knowledge access and use – legal staff are archetypal knowledge workers and as such will benefit from the ability to quickly identify, access, and use collective knowledge.
• Improved collaboration capabilities – whether this is as simple as quickly bringing a colleague onto a particular piece of work or the ability to work with others outside of the legal team or the organization.
• Superior reporting and analytics – given that work is now handled digitally “from cradle to grave” it makes it easier to gain visibility into operations, performance, demand, and improvement opportunities. For example, to optimize legal staffing based on demand relative to the required number of people and specific knowledge and skills. Especially where self-help and automation ease some of the pressure on legal personnel.
• Improved governance, risk management, compliance, and security – for example, the digital workflows make it easier to benefit from internal controls and audit trails. Plus, modern service management tools offer granular security permissions such that access to information can be limited down to specific groups and even individuals.

If you would like to learn more about how service management can accelerate the operations and outcomes of your legal team, get in touch with us at Praecipio!

Enterprise Service Management solutions are beginning to make their way into every part of the organizational structure, breaking down silos and improving how teams work. Service Management uses IT Service Management (ITSM) capabilities in other business functions to improve operations and outcomes.

The best way to understand how Enterprise Service Management solutions can transform your organization is to discuss the value that a Service Management approach brings to your teams.

3 Benefits of a Service Management Approach

While Enterprise Service Management might still be relatively new in people's minds, despite being a "thing" for over a decade, ITSM has been evolving for over three decades. There are many reasons for its success, including the following benefits that apply to both ITSM and Enterprise Service Management scenarios:

1. Service-based thinking moves service providers from a supply view of the world to a demand-based view. This allows them to be better aligned with business wants and needs, including consumer-like services and support.
2. The use of best practice Service Management guidance – using ITSM bodies of knowledge such as ITIL 4 – helps service providers to optimize their service delivery and support capabilities. After all, we've discussed how ITSM and ITIL aren't that different. This framework will help your business function to be all three of "better, faster, cheaper" in terms of the better operations:
   • Providing better outcomes and service experiences
   • Realizing efficiency gains and reduced operational costs.
3. The consistency of operations leads to better outcomes and helps to improve employee morale and satisfaction.

These benefits are all then enabled and enhanced by using fit-for-purpose technology in the form of an ITSM tool that offers capabilities such as digital workflows, self-service, service request catalogs, knowledge availability, automation, and orchestration, collaborative abilities, and anytime and anyplace access.

Enterprise Service Management not only delivers optimized capabilities and a better service experience but also allows the service provider/receiver "dynamic." Service provider capabilities are now designed around the employee's needs rather than individual corporate service providers, such as human resources (HR), facilities, IT, etc.

6 Benefits of Using an Enterprise Service Management Tool

There are many enabling capabilities provided by an Enterprise Service Management tool, as outlined earlier, that can be directly translated into benefits for service requesters, service provider staff, and your organization as a whole. For example, employing fit-for-purpose technology allows you to:

1. Facilitate the optimization of practices/processes and the people that work within them. The available digital workflows allow work to flow faster, as do technology-enabled knowledge management capabilities. This results in better outcomes and experiences, with associated productivity improvements for both service provider staff and the people they're serving.
2. Offer a greater choice of access and communication channels to employees. With consumer-like omnichannel support available via chat (and chatbots) and self-service/help capabilities as well as the traditional telephone, email, and potentially "walk-up" channels. The use of self-service/help capabilities also increases the speed of resolution and minimizes the associated business function "handling" costs.
3. Help manage demand for service and support. With self-help and chatbots, along with knowledge management, in particular offering the opportunity to deflect new requests and calls for status updates.
4. Provide greater visibility into business function operations and performance, with the ability to better understand what has been achieved and what still needs to be accomplished. Plus, the identification of continuous improvement opportunities across operations, services, outcomes, and employee experience.
5. Offer improved collaboration capabilities. Making it easier for work to be passed between, or worked on collectively by, various people and even across teams in different business functions.
6. Provide a better return on investment (ROI) for the corporate ITSM tool. The more the ITSM tool – or what now might be called an Enterprise Service Management tool – is used to save time and money, the better the ROI for the tool.

ESM & AI

In addition to the traditional people and process technology-enablement, the growing availability of artificial intelligence (AI)-based capabilities in enterprise service management tools provides even higher levels of available benefits. For example, through intelligent automated ticket triage or chatbots as the first customer touchpoint. The impact of AI on enterprise service management will be covered in more detail in a future blog.

To Wrap Up

As you can see, the benefits of employing an Enterprise Service Management tool cover a broad spectrum of areas that impacts overall organizational performance. Like you, we examined business professionals about their adoption and thoughts regarding Enterprise Service Management tools. You can download the 2021 State of Service Management report here. Additionally, if you're still unsure if you should be calling it ITSM, ESM, or SM, you can check out this blog.

If we've convinced you that Enterprise Service Management tools can help you reduce friction, increase transparency, and increase your return-on-investment, then reach out, and we'll be in touch.

There are many definitions and uses of the term Enterprise Service Management in our industry. It can be confusing but it's worth defining because Enterprise Service Management is a powerful framework you'll want to leverage extensively in your digital transformation. So, what is Enterprise Service Management or ESM?

Is it even called "Enterprise Service Management" now?

Let's start with the first word of this phrase, Enterprise. In 2021, Praecipio conducted a survey on the state of Service Management. One of the questions we asked attempted to get right to the heart of this particular debate:

Is it called "Enterprise Service Management"?

Source: Praecipio 2021 State of Service Management Survey.

Service Management originated within IT organizations (and is often referred to as IT Service Management, or ITSM). Enterprise Service Management then was often used to describe the application of Service Management's principles and practices for teams outside of IT.

Service Management in Practice

A good way to get a feel for Service Management is to look at some examples of how it can help various functions within an enterprise. We've seen customers use Service Management to level up across their organization with amazing results.

Whether the customers are internal or external, every organizational function is in the business of providing service. The facilities team provides well-maintained, functional physical spaces. The accounting team provides financial record-keeping and reporting. Human resources provide talent recruitment, employment policy, and wellness programs. The IT helpdesk and customer support teams are also classic examples, and the list goes on.

While all of these teams serve different purposes, they all deliver services to customers. In that light, they share the practices and capabilities of Service Management. Each team needs to manage these common attributes in order to deliver an exceptional service experience Some examples include:

• Request intake
• Resource workload
• Incidents (when things don't go quite as planned)
• Knowledge sharing
• Metrics and improvement
• Change

Each team often has a variety of use cases for some or all of the list above. Problems arise when each team or department is using its own customized program or solution. For example, when teams try to work collaboratively, having siloed tools creates friction and slows down processes.

This is what Service Management was designed to address.

Frameworks Guide Us

The most effective way to adopt Service Management is to work from a comprehensive framework, like ITIL 4. Looking at the highest levels of ITIL, the practices, we get a sense of how it can be used to define and improve service delivery.

The largest ITIL practice area, Service Management, is comprised of 17 practices, including Service Desk, Availability Management, Change Control, Incident Management, and Validation/Testing.

Managing your organization’s service delivery using these practices produces an upward spiral of improvement and capability. As consultants, this is where we spend most of our time, designing and configuring the Atlassian Service Management tools to enable these critical practices.

In Conclusion

While it's tempting to start with tools as a solution to service delivery challenges, you must first begin with the practice and treat the tool as a supporting component. This enables you to define critical policy and strategy decisions that align the entire organization instead of losing focus and having to constantly reinvent the wheel. Additionally, this mindset will set you up for success in preparing your teams for the ever-changing business landscape of our digital future.

To read more about Service Management, check out our blog on how Service Management is More Than an IT Service Desk. 

There's a big wide world of Service Management out there and it can be a little confusing to navigate! Let us be your guide! Get in touch and let's determine how Praecipio can best help you adopt and accelerate Service Management throughout your organization.