Your IT infrastructure is much like an ecosystem—it’s always evolving, and the more things stay in balance, the better the entire system works. Just like can ecosystem needs certain things to remain healthy, so does your IT infrastructure—except instead of things like rain, sunlight, flora, and fauna, we’re talking about patches, upgrades, and so on.
Do No Harm
While that may sound obvious, managing the changes within our IT infrastructure improperly can create tremendous strain on an IT organization whose resources are already constrained, especially because these wounds can be self-inflicted. If fact, studies show that 80% of unplanned downtime is caused by IT itself due to improper change management practices. And the incidents that arise from avoidable issues like these further upset the balance in this ecosystem by diverting resources from where they’re needed most.
Build a Solid Foundation
The ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) framework can help you build a solid foundation for both managing change through proper planning, controls, and documentation, and also by establishing some basic tenants for a best-in-class IT service management (ITSM) practice:
- Categorize incidents and service requests by differentiating one from the other.
- Establish clear criteria for triaging incoming requests to determine their urgency, set reasonable resolution targets, and determine appropriate escalation protocols.
- Provide outstanding customer service by promoting a culture of courteous service, which fosters better relationships and congruent expectations.
- Hold IT accountable by using data to guide improvement strategies, spending time on projects rather than fighting fires, and fulfilling more service requests than incidents.
Leverage a One-Platform Approach
It’s very common for an incoming incident to spin up a new project for proper resolution. For example, what starts as a few reports of users not being able to access the internet from a certain location turns out to be a router that’s gone belly-up and needs to be replaced, so being able to group similar issues that have been reported and generate a project from those helps to capture relevant troubleshooting data in one convenient place and allows technicians to quickly and easily status updates to uses. Conversely, while proper change management should go a long way to mitigate this (see above), going live with an infrastructure upgrade project can also create some issues—at least initially, so being able to quickly create tickets from an actual project can really streamline time to resolution.
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