Has anyone set up a customer focus group or forum to illicit feedback and ideas from internal customers in relation to using the ITSM tool?

Any ideas around scope, challenges, who to invite etc.....

Any help / insights appreciated 

My team are looking to update our Major Incident Communication Template so that communications to our stakeholders and customers are short and succinct. 

I was wondering if anyone was able to share any examples or have any ideas on how to best manage communications?

Our current template can often cause additional effort which causes issues with the quality of the communication itself and takes time to complete while managing recovery. 

Thanks!

Jack.

AWS tend to provide Multi zone and single zone availability and this is for each service they offer . So if you purchase multiple services ( say 5 ) but all are at Multi Region (99.9%) are you setting your application availability based upon standard ITIL practice of Multiplying the 5 targets together so you end up with 99.5% or because the likelihood if failure is small because you have built in multi zone capability you would set the target as 99.9% 

AWS appears to be more about zone availability that on premise hosting where you would base on servers and load balancing 

There are other factors you would add in like Network capability to get to the cloud hosting but am more interested in the cloud approach people are taking

I hope you are all well.

As part of a new initiative within my company, we are looking at replacing our historic "Critical Services Tool" with something new. The functionality of our current tool is very limited, whereby you purely update the Critical Services as "Down (Red), Degraded (Amber) or Green (Up)". This then pushes an email to a defined distribution list notifying stakeholders of the alert.

As part of this initiative, we thought it would be a good idea to identify what other businesses are using. We would like to retain the core functionality of our current tool, while looking at potential improvements, such as:

- API / Website Monitoring.

- Integrated Critical Incident Communications, which webhook into other applications such as ServiceNow / BMC Helix.

- Outage Scheduling (Potentially automated via Webhooking into other services).

All thoughts would be welcome! Some of the potential systems we have looked at briefly are StatusPage by Atlassian and BetterStack, for reference.

Much appreciated,

James.

Within my organization, we are looking to put together a business case to improve our use of ServiceNow and look to implement some additional modules. At the moment, we are only utilizing the basic ITSM Module.

From my research, the ITOM Functionality would make a massive improvement to our delivery of IT Services to our End-Users. I was looking to try and collate some feedback on any people who currently have the ITOM Function live within Service Now, and gather some real-life examples as to where cost-savings were made.

Some of the big opportunities, in my mind, are:

-Automated CMDB Mapping / Discovery - Sniffing the network, automatically filling the CMDB and reduncing man hours spent auditing / removing human error. Building relationships between CIs, identifying Single Points of Failures or redudant links between CIs.

- ServiceNow Orchestration - .Workflows to automate manual tasks such as Password Resets, Software Distribution etc.

Please do provide some feedback!

I can see the logic (and also some references in ServiceNow specifically) of how the existence of a Problem could trigger the creation of an issue linked to a risk, and if the Risk is accepted there is another process link to the KEDB.  I'm less sure about a connection between IM and Risk.

If anyone out there has any experience of the same process and tooling work and they could share a few thoughts, I'd really appreciate your perspectives.  

Many thanks

I'm looking to engage with a company to come on site and conduct a maturity assessment of our ITSM processes. I was wondering if anyone has any recommendations of companies to use please?

Many thanks in advance.

As a manager of a team whose responsibilities include Problem Management, I am keen to engage with other leads to share experiences and ideas. As usual this is triggered by the annual 'What KPIs shall I introduce for the year' challenge!

The above has been easy for the last 2 years, as PM had lacked good focus, due to it being just one small part of a team covering many disciplines including on-call Major Incident, which has now been split into a separate area. So for 2 years the focus has been on reduction of numbers, by identifying obsolete records, those already fixed, those that should not have been there in the first place (for instance CSIPs), conversion to Known Error, etc, etc. An easy KPI to set , with lots of nice graphs to demonstrate good progress. Plus a massive tidy up to make life easier, using new queries and tailored automated reporting. A job well done, numbers are down from around 1,600 to just over 300. So we have done 'quantity' and now move onto 'quality'!

As stated I am looking to maybe get a discussion group of some sort going, and indeed was looking to host a forum working with itSMF before this cursed epidemic hit.

Regards

Alan Burgess (Vocalink, now part of Mastercard)

Does anyone have any recommendations for IT equipment delivery and collection services/companies that would work in both a project capacity, and business as usual activity?

Thanks

Laura

E.g. was it critical that all the Services were defined with certain attributes before implementation or could these be added iteratively following implementation?

How about the processes? 

How did importing the asset data from another system go?

Questions, questions, questions....

Your thoughts would be very much appreciated

Thanks

Mark

We don't currently have a way of representing the value of our services - we don’t have a defined method of converting time to a financial value of our services and we would now like to represent our services in terms of reduced business time lost. 

There are a number of methodologies to quantify business time lost that we have found, for example:

• IDC's DevOps Best Practice Metrics: Fortune 1000 Survey – average cost of critical application failure is $US100k per hour.
• Cost of Downtime (per hour) = Lost Revenue + Lost Productivity + Cost to Recover + Cost of Intangibles (i.e. reputation cost)

Are there any other methods anyone has come across?

Thanks

If so then it would be great to speak to you as this is something my company are considering as a result of an ongoing internal restructure and an impending M&A.

Thanks

Darren

Many thanks

Jo

I am interested to understand who you grant permissions to in your ITSM toolset? 

We currently have a very loose model of which as product owner I would like to refine after understanding the need to have certain permission sets across the board however I equally don't wish to hinder service and the change will be potentially uncomfortable for our Service Desk who previously have had free rein and full admin rights. 

If you are willing to share I am keen to understand:

- Who has access to make changes to your toolset and what are they permitted to do on their own? ie, add/amend categories/services, create forms, amend processes, set up and change Email AutoLogging.

- How do you govern/record changes to your toolset such as new categories or forms?  

Appreciate any thoughts and input.

Thanks 

Jakki

With regards to measuring quality of service, does anyone have any existing benchmarking data that you would be willing to share?

And/or any suggestions as to how to capture this measure to enable benchmarking activities.

TIA

I have worked in organisations which have permitted a 'free-for-all' approach which resulted in the generation of many, many one-off performance reports and others which restricted access down to a minimum. Wonder who has experience of where either of these have been deemed to be successful or a disaster.

Has anyone actually developed a Reporting Service with the required expertise centralised and a request process utilised to manage the demand. I suspect the 'agile' ones amongst us will have a problem with that 'controlled' approach.

Would appreciate any comments, thoughts and/or advice.

Many thanks

Mark