Ivanti Blog: Posts by

Pumpkin Spice Day 1st October

Fri, 01 Oct 2021 19:26:29 Z

Yes, It REALLY is a thing. Who doesn’t love a nice steaming Pumpkin Spice latte to drink whilst the colours of the leaves are changing? Autumn, or fall for my American friends, is my favourite time of the year, it’s time to bring in all the food that I have been growing in the garden, time to clear the vegetable patches and start to plan for the coming year. Don’t forget it is only 30 days till Halloween as well.

Ask yourself some questions.

What went well over this growing season?

How did the outside influences alter your plans? Perhaps the weather wasn’t as good as you expected.

It’s good to take a step back and take a fresh look at things that you have been working on. You could leave this for six months and have a spring clean, but a lot can change in this time.

We should adopt this same mentality when we look at our ITSM toolset.

Many years ago, I remember an ITSM trainer saying that we don’t need to collect data if we are not going to report on it. I could see his point here. Why collect data just for collecting data’s sake.

Durations, categorisations, interactions…… there’s gold in this data. You just need to find a way of making sense of it.

Whilst all toolsets can tell you how many tickets you opened and closed over a period of time; it is important to be able to drill down into this data to get a more granular view.

You may want to use the set of inbuilt reports that you got with your ITSM tool, or perhaps you want to use some 3^rd party BI tool to access the data. Even getting the data out in a csv file can be manipulated using Microsoft Excel.

How can we use this data? Let’s look at typical information that we gets entered or automatically created when we log, for example, an incident.

Username
Created date and time
Service, Category, Sub-category
Description
How the ticket was created
Linked Configuration Item
Impact and Urgency.
Auto Assigned team based on Categorisation.

With just these few fields we can start to look for trends. We will ignore the description field as these tend to be quite large and don’t lend themselves to lists and reports. This is why most systems have a summary or title field to record a fixed length short description.

Let’s take each field and look to see what we can do with it.

Username

Chances are that once you know the Username, you will automatically be able to pull additional fields from the user or employee table. Think about grouping by department, company or site. Of course, you can always plot these calls over a timeline. Perhaps a user constantly logs a ticket with the same issue. We can be proactive and focus on the underlying issue rather than being reactive.

Does a particular department have a swarm of tickets at a certain time of the year? We can see this and anticipate it.

Created data and time

This tends to be an automatically created field. It’s great to use for the SLA calculation but with some simple manipulation we can report on hours, day names, months, AM or PM. This is a wonderful field for establishing trends over time. Perhaps your service desk may be able to perform better in the morning? Or maybe you could pull in some additional staff for the three months running up to Christmas?

Service, Category and Sub-category

Because of the way that these are structured, simple rolling up of data can be achieved. How many tickets were logged against a particular service? What is the percentage of incident against service requests, and what is the frequency? It is all about patterns, do we have similar incidents? Is this part of a bigger problem that we need to look at? Perhaps you see a pattern with email every Friday afternoon.

How was the ticket created?

What channel was used to log the ticket initially? Your ITSM tool should be able to automatically populate this field, whether it’s by email, via a chat or self-service portal. Monitoring this can help you understand your audience. If there is a change of use from the self-service portal to the telephone, then you need to investigate and understand why this is the case. This information used in conjunction with the company or department name gives you a target audience to ‘sell’ the alternative logging methods to.

Linked Configuration Item

Not all incidents and requests will have a known configuration item linked to them. Those that do allow you to make decisions. How many incidents were logged against that server? What was the total time that was spent fixing those incidents? What was the cost to the organisation? And of course, is this server still economically viable? Maybe it’s time to get rid of it and bring in a new one. These same tickets can be useful to your Purchasing department. Perhaps the number of recurring incidents against a particular asset can be used as leverage when negotiating the next maintenance contract.

Impact and Urgency

Certainly, you can use the calculated priority based on these values to report on. But what about looking deeper into the actual impacts? Just how many tickets were raised that affected the entire company or a department?

Auto assigned team

All good ITSM tools will be able to automatically assign a ticket to the correct resolver group based on its categorization. This of course is not perfect. So how about also recording all those times a ticket was incorrectly categorised? This can be used to refine your categorization questions or if using machine learning, help it. This also is a great way of seeing who gets the most calls. Do you need to reassign staff from one resolver team to another, perhaps at certain points of the year, think about the new influx of students to a campus and their issues, or perhaps password resets after a holiday weekend?

The one thing in common with all these reports is a timescale. Do you want to look back at the last week, month, year, year-on-year etc.? Make sure that your toolset allows for this filter to be easily used.

And remember, this all takes time, to report on the data, it must be collected. You cannot run a yearly report without a minimum of a year’s data being in there. So, take a look at your current reports, are they giving you the information that you need, in a format that is easy to understand.

As a solution engineer, I am always hearing that a prospect wishes to change their ITSM tool as they just can’t get the information they want out of the system. Now it might be time to take stock of your system, grab a hot cup of pumpkin spice Latte and investing some time during the Autumn and Winter to ensure that you can make the right changes in the right areas.

Of course, if you just cannot get the data out because you are stuck without of the box reports or your ITSM tool just doesn’t manage the data in a sensible way, it may be time to start looking around for another toolset.

Learn more about how Ivanti can help you with your ITSM dashboard and reporting today!

What Does The Princess Bride Have to Do with Your Service Desk?

Tue, 14 Sep 2021 12:00:01 Z

On Sept. 25 The Princess Bride will be 34 Years Old

What? You haven’t seen The Princess Bride? “Inconceivable!”

Based on a 1973 book by William Goldman, the film became a cult classic. A story of true love, giants, pirates and miracles – it is loved by IT geeks all around the world.

So many memorable quotations, and so many references to use when selecting a new service desk. It would be rude not to quote some.

“When I was your age, television was called books.”

Yes, and we all used to paint pictures on cave walls. Like it or not, time moves on, your customers are getting younger and more tech savvy. (Don’t get me started on their more lack of patience). Does your list of new tools give you a true omni channel experience? At the very least it should be browser based. But does it automatically adapt to the device that it is on? Take a look around you the next time you’re out in public. That small screen on people’s phones is their gateway to everything, including service desks. Incidents and requests will be logged as soon as they hit a hurdle. Time is of the essence to the next generation of workforce.

“I’ll tell you the truth and it’s up to you to live with it.”

What was wrong with the old service desk software? Obviously, something. Was it out of support? Have you just outgrown it? What were the top 10 biggest problems that you found with it?

Now you have criteria for choosing your new software. As I said earlier, time has moved on. Don’t go expecting miracles (there is no Miracle Max in this article.) Many of your issues may have been caused by a poor initial implementation. Learn from this and ensure that your new solution, is implemented correctly. If you start cutting corners you will never be able to utilize all of your new tool’s features.

“The only way forward is to never look back.”

I cannot count the number of sales calls with a prospect where they insist that they must bring across all of their data. It has to work the same as the old system… Surely, they would be better just continuing to use the old system?

Don’t be scared of change. Change is good. Your new choice of tool will enable you to do things better, faster, stronger than your old tool. But only if you can adopt some of its processes.

And why do you want to fill up a perfectly good new system with junk from years ago? Now I will agree, some data is worth taking across. Perhaps your knowledge. But, your users will probably be brought in fresh from Active Directory and your configuration items will be brought in from a discovery tool.

Keep your old data, but in a separate system. Not only will it make your system easier to navigate but it will save you a HUGE amount of consultancy time.

“Well, why didn't you list that among our assets in the first place?”

Talking of Assets and configuration items, are you still using spreadsheets as a hardware asset register? Or maybe you have an integration to a discovery tool? Just as before, things have moved on in the last few years since you got your last service desk. Ask your vendors if they have their own discovery tool. What benefits could that give you? Does it mean that you can stride towards hyper-automation, self-healing and proactive service management? How easy would it be to integrate that tool to your old discovery toolset? Does it use APIs and webhook?

“Life isn't fair, it's just fairer than death, that's all.”

You have a budget, don’t you? This should have been one of the first things that you discussed before embarking on this journey. Don’t be scared to share this with vendors. As a customer we all want the shiny, sparkling new tool. But can we afford it? Vendors will be honest with you if you’re honest with them. Let them know your budget at the early stages of conversations. They will be quick to let you know if you’re way off the mark for their software. While some movement of cost can happen, you need to also be realistic. Maybe you can rule out the top two of your lists of vendors on cost? That has saved both you and the vendor time, and they will appreciate it too.

Do you need all those bells and whistles? Is your company mature enough for the tool? Take another look at your requirements and budgets, and with a tear in your eye dismiss the fancy or expensive tools.

“We’ll never survive!”
“Nonsense. You’re only saying that because no one ever has.”

Your vendor of choice will do whatever they can to help you through the procurement cycle. The supplier has done this thousands of times before. Their consultants can give real world examples and war stories to ensure that you fully understand any implication that could happen by going down a certain path. But with this comes responsibility from your side as well. You will not get your new service desk installed and working within a week. A project plan will need to be built between the professional services and yourself. Ensure that you have the resources available when they will be needed. I’m sure many of you have been sat around waiting for someone to turn up and do their small but important task. In the end you will get through this, but there may be a few small bumps in the road.

“True love is the best thing in the world, except for a nice MLT, Mutton, lettuce and tomato sandwich.”

Don’t you just love your new service desk? Did you decide on a big bang approach to implement it, or did you go with the favored phased approach? From an implementation point of view, it is easier to fix issues within a sprint rather than looking for a needle in a haystack. IT also means that you can bring on certain processes quickly (keeping the big guy upstairs happy with their investment). And when you finally have a working service desk, don’t rest on your laurels. Continuous improvement can be monitored and acted upon – look for patterns and trends. Is there something that could be done to improve a particular area?

Think about the beginning of this article, people want instant access, can you improve the self-service portal? How about changing the look every so often? A simple change of background images goes a long way. Also, think about how you can drive more traffic through the portal. Can you offer out more services or perhaps some external content? Of course, you want to be able to do this yourself without the need for code and not having to pay for expensive consultants.

“Hello . . . my name is Inigo Montoya; you killed my father . . . prepare to die . . . .”

So, there you go, some great quotations from an amazing film. And of course, some great ideas to think about when looking to change your service desk.

And all this without any mention of The Rodents of Unusual Size, The Fire Swamp, The Pit of Despair or Shrieking Eels!

To start your journey, take a look at how Gartner ranks ITSM Tools. Or have a look at how Ivanti Neurons for ITSM can help your business.