This white paper outlines the challenges associated with IT Request Management and ten best practices that represent the hard-won knowledge from dozens of successful Service Request Management projects. By following these guidelines, your IT organization can provide more responsive service delivery, increase operational efficiency, and improve internal customer satisfaction.
Ten Best Practices for
IT Request Management
newScale White PaperTen Best Practices for IT Request Management
Table of Contents ...
Introduction ...............................................................................................................1
The Current State of IT Request Management ...............................................1
ITIL, The Service Catalog and Request Ful? llment ........................................2
Ten Best Practices for Success .............................................................................3
Conclusion ................................................................................................................8
About newScale ......................................................................................................9Introduction
Introduction ...Requests for IT services usually exceed the available time and resources needed to ful? ll all the requests. IT service teams in most large corporations are constantly reacting to requests from the business. Meanwhile, employees continue to complain that IT is dif? cult to work with, unresponsive, and takes too long to ful? ll the services they need to do their job.
The explosion of application options, and the continually connected workforce have led to more and more pressure on IT organizations. Not only is there more technology per user, but the applications and options are more complicated than ever. As a result, the increase in the volume and complexity of service requests - requests for everything from access to applications, to software enhancements, to computer upgrades, to email and network access - have expanded dramatically.
That challenge is only compounded by the fact that each group within the IT "Everyday requests for organization usually has a different system in place for managing requests. And IT services, ranging while IT is constantly busy, staff members are hindered by manual and inef? cient from help desk calls to processes - or working on tasks that may not be a top priority for the business. requests for bug ? xes to provisioning a new This white paper outlines the challenges associated with IT Request Management employee. pour into and ten best practices that represent the hard-won knowledge from dozens of IT from many different successful Service Request Management projects. By following these guidelines, directions and via your IT organization can provide more responsive service delivery, increase many different operational ef? ciency, and improve internal customer satisfaction. mechanisms. But outside of a formal IT service The Current State of IT Request Management ... request process, First let's take a look at the typical IT Request Management environment from the tactical demand can perspective of the "requesters" and the "service delivery" teams responding to overwhelm the IT the request. department because it is dif? cult to One of the most immediate observations is that there are many different types forecast and of IT requests. These range from end user move-add-change requests (e.g., on- anticipate."boarding a new employee, upgrading a laptop), to work requests for a business - Craig Symons, application (e.g., hosting an application for the marketing department, changing Principal Analyst, a report), or more technical requests where one IT group requests services from Forrester Research, another IT group (e.g., deploying a new application environment, setting up a new "How IT Must Shape And Manage server in the data center). Depending on the type and nature of the request, each Demand"is handled differently.
. For requesters: Most companies have multiple, con? icting and disparate mechanisms for ordering or requesting internal services on the front end. Does this sound familiar? Multiple intranets, web forms, Lotus Notes databases and custom applications all over the place; new forms getting developed all the time; employees and managers are forced to retype the same data again and again; end users continue to call the help desk or use the "shoulder tap" method to submit service requests; and business leaders are frustrated by their inability to order just once and then have IT deliver the service reliably.
. For service delivery teams: On the back end, most IT operations are organized around functional silos, characterized by their own set of process... [download for more]
