Traditionally, efforts to improve IT service management (ITSM) practices was tied primarily to either objective maturity models, or where there’s desire or opportunity to improve. In this article I’ll describe why all improvement efforts must support employee experience (EX) and then introduce the concept of mapping specific EX points to the ITSM practice(s) that most directly contribute to that element.

It’s worth pausing to note that the art and science of Customer Experience (CX) is often times intermixed with EX. For all practice purposes, they’re the same; but when an internal IT department speaks of customers of its services, they most often mean non-IT employees of the same organization. The opportunity, then, is that excellent employee experience empowers employees to provide better value to the organization’s customers (what ITIL 4 refers to as cocreation of value.)

In this blog @GTSanker looks at how to introduce a new way to prioritize improvement work in direct alignment with EX. #ITSM #servicedesk #EX Click To Tweet

Note: I’ll not be addressing experience level agreements (XLAs) or user journey/value stream mapping but I will reference them. This will not be a typical how-to, but rather introducing a new way to prioritize improvement work in direct alignment with EX.

The question of where and how to improve ITSM practices has been somewhat of an enigma for many years.

It’s not uncommon to start with maturity assessments, where practice areas are benchmarked against established maturity models (like CMMI, ITIL Maturity Model, etc. ). Once current maturity is established, target maturity in key practice areas is planned. With current and desired future states defined, it’s straightforward to develop an improvement plan to get from here to there.

This approach has the benefit of being independent, objective, and measurable. I’ve used this method myself, and it can be especially useful when targeted improvements to entire ITSM practices are the desired outcome – “we want to improve our incident management process”, for instance. 

Unfortunately however, “maturity”, leaves something to be desired, especially if you consider that it’s quite possible to have a process that’s highly mature, and yet still missing the mark in significant ways for the culture and context of the organization. It also tends to be somewhat broad in nature – giving an overall assessment of entire practice area.

It’s quite possible to have a process that’s highly mature, and yet still missing the mark in significant ways for the culture and context of the organization, says @GTSanker #servicedesk #ITSM #EX Click To Tweet

If it hurts, fix it

Another popular approach is what’s commonly known as “pain point” analysis. Everyone has used this point. In short – find out what parts of our practices are painful for customers and users and make them less painful.

I like it because it at least attempts to establish how our practices impact key stakeholders. If it’s painful for them, it’s likely that making targeted improvement will reduce pain and frustration, which is moving in the right direction – closer to our customers.

While 'pain point' analysis can be useful, it often falls short ns taking a holistic view of the employees’ overall experience with IT and IT services, says @GTSanker #servicedesk #ITSM #EX Click To Tweet

Personally, I’ve used this a lot for making incremental improvements. You can never go wrong with asking your customers what you could do better and start making those improvements.

While it’s a step in the right direction, where both of these techniques often fall short is taking a holistic view of the employees’ overall experience with IT and IT services.

Taking a holistic view

It was my time as a CIO that gave me a different vantage point on ITSM improvement. My organization had business challenges and I needed to make IT improvements rapidly. There was a tremendous pressure to fix the things that mattered the most – to my colleagues. I didn’t have the luxury of either broad or long term improvement effort.

“Customer Experience” and it’s close cousin “Employee Experience” is taking the IT world by storm.  Experience Management has become a thing in recent years. Happy Signals, QSTAC, XLACollab, and others are doing great work in moving Experience Management to the forefront of IT excellence.

And while XLAs may not be replacing traditional Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in the near future, they represent a new frontier in ways that are entirely practical.

Let me explain.

While XLAs may not be replacing traditional SLAs in the near future, they represent a new frontier in ways that are entirely practical – @GTSanker #XLA #SLA #ServiceDesk #ITSM Click To Tweet

It’s one thing to understand the overall employee sentiment and perception of IT. There’s been a growing interest in customer satisfaction, often times measured by transactional measures like Net Promoter Score (NPS) – which is fine as far as it goes, but where the real magic begins is where we’re able to map experience elements – at a fairly granular level – to very specific components of our ITSM practice areas that most directly impact that element.

Mapping CX to ITSM Improvements

It’s not a simple matter of surveying how your customers feel, and turning the crank and magically out comes a custom improvement plan.

The QSTAC approach is pretty straightforward – rate IT in 5 key categories that QSTAC believes represents meaningful dimensions of IT Customers’ Experience. One of those categories is speed (the ‘S’ in QSTAC).

Let’s say that the score for speed is notably lower than other elements (like Accessibility and Communication, for instance). This would suggest that, for whatever reason, employees felt that IT was underperforming (in their perception) in the area of speed.

But what does this mean?

Well, without further information, it’s impossible to say for sure.

It could be any of these:

• Incidents not being resolved in a timely fashion
• The service desk taking too long to acknowledge a caller
• Service enhancement requests take too long to get approved and implemented
• New employees don’t have the equipment they need on their first day
• The CIO has too many emails and takes too long to reply to questions and concerns
• Networks or technology may be slow or inefficient.

The truth is, it can be any, several, or all of these – and more.

The challenge, then, is to go to work trying to understand the underlying causes of the belief that IT is slow. “More information” can come in the form of free form comments. It can come from personal conversations with employees. It can come from focus panels and follow up interviews.

Employee experience must become a feedback loop that provides regular input into the improvement efforts – not a single point in time – @GTSanker #servicedesk #EX #ITSM Click To Tweet

Once you’ve mapped out multiple potential causes of the experience element(s), you can use other assessments (like those mentioned at the beginning) to attempt to be as precise as possible about which areas of your service delivery may be most directly impacting the noted experience elements.

Employee experience must become a feedback loop that provides regular input into the improvement efforts – not a single point in time. If improvements aren’t ‘moving the needle’ in employee experience, we must attempt to determine why. Are we incorrect in our analysis of the underlying causes? Are our efforts making their experience worse (in the intended target areas, or elsewhere)? Has there been insufficient time for the improvements to be noticed (or enough to change previous (unfavorable) sentiments?)

All #ITSM improvement efforts MUST begin with a solid understanding of how employees experience IT. This is what I learned as a CIO needing to rapidly drive improvements, says @GTSanker #CIO #ServiceDesk #ITSM #EX Click To Tweet

Remember that employee experience is measured both formally and informally. IT leadership – all IT staff, really – must be in regular communication with employees. Every interaction is an opportunity to assess how their experience is going. Same? Improving? Declining?

Each becomes a short and direct feedback loop that can provide near real time feedback on how improvement efforts are being received. This opens the door to real time experience-based course corrections in improvement plans.

In the end, all ITSM improvement efforts must begin with a solid understanding of how employees experience IT. This is what I learned as a CIO needing to rapidly drive improvements. The short feedback loops (ongoing experience information) is critical to validate and/or alter course and produce results as quickly as possible.