ITIL: A Framework For Excellence In IT Management

Let's be honest: If your clients experience IT problems, they want things fixed quickly, so they can get back to work. At ConnectWise, it is our job to ensure that the excellent services your customers may take for granted will never become problematic. We have learned the best practices needed to ensure your IT services are highly available and ahead of the curve, allowing you to focus on managing IT services, not putting out IT fires. ITIL can help you improve your services to clients and become more skilled and productive, while lowering your costs. Here's how your organization will benefit:

• Competitive advantage through improved IT services. ITIL is information pooled from IT Managers with many years of experience, providing helpdesk members with a broad depth of information to service their clients. In turn, this knowledge teaches helpdesk members a repeatable process to efficiently and effectively accomplish a task or list of desired objectives. However, not all IT service providers take advantage of this level of training—and ConnectWise offers you a unique competitive advantage for that very reason.
• Change management. As the most comprehensive approach to standardizing IT operations, ITIL provides structure to a function that has often lacked it. Gone are the days of implementing a system, reactively fixing a problem, and then hoping the fixes hold up. ITIL provides a basis for managing and adapting to change, enabling client businesses to become more flexible, responsive, and productive.
• Structured, flexible guidelines. ITIL is founded on the principle that an alignment between IT and business strategy is critical. Effective IT service support is necessary for that alignment to occur. ITIL provides the guidelines that enable you to support your clients as they align their IT needs with business objectives.

What is ITIL?

ITIL focuses on creating alignment between IT and business objectives. At its foundation, ITIL is a library consisting of six core books, enhanced by complementary publications and web services. Established techniques and processes enable the measurement and continuous improvement of IT service management. ITIL is unique for four reasons:

• Vendor-neutral, best practice guidance. ITIL is not a “carved-in-stone” method of operating. In fact, one of the key founding principles of ITIL is that you do not follow someone else’s process verbatim. Instead, the theories and methodologies founded in ITIL should only serve as a guideline.
• Unlimited applicability. The theories of ITIL can be applied to any business in any industry.
• All-encompassing and dependable. Rather than focusing in on one key principle or lesson, ITIL instead focuses on the process of IT service management. This level of detail allows for consistent and common-sense distinctions within each process.
• Widely implemented. As a rule, ITIL encourages business alliance, making it a wise choice for organizing the business of IT. That means your customer will never have to wonder if you are working with their best interests at heart; after all, it’s a given.

If you’re committed to adopting the ITIL framework and best practices, ConnectWise is here to help! We’ll support your ITIL initiatives with our ITIL-certified service professionals, shared best practices, and a Professional Service Automation solution that can help your business implement ITIL and dramatically improve your IT service management for clients. ConnectWise PSA was designed to help your company:

• Resolve client IT incidents quickly with responsive ticketing and service boards.
• Integrate with MSP tools such as remote monitoring to proactively prevent future incidents.
• Track incidents, services, and solutions to grow your knowledgebase.
• Report to clients about what services you’ve performed—and why.
• Manage and fulfill Service Level Agreements.
• Adapt to changes in your clients’ business objectives by offering additional services and automating critical workflows.

Use the ITIL Framework for the Benefit of Your Clients

The ITIL materials lend a systematic and professional approach to IT operations. As you learn more about what aspects of ITIL are the best fit to implement in your business and client service offerings, think about how ConnectWise PSA can help. It has been developed with ITIL processes in mind, and can be particularly valuable in the following areas:

• Incident Management – If your client experiences an unplanned service interruption, the help desk must be able to respond and resolve issues. ConnectWise has multiple service boards and built in priorities and issue escalation to ensure your team can handle client incidents quickly.
• Availability Management: Both your company and your clients need to utilize IT assets and human resources efficiently and proactively. ConnectWise dispatch and scheduling functionality helps you achieve effective resource utilization.
• Request Management – IT service organizations need to have the right workflows in place to receive service requests and work them to resolution as quickly as possible, without missing any items. Multiple service boards and flexible service ticketing in ConnectWise PSA help you get the job done.
• Service Level Management - Create service level agreements with your clients so that everyone is in agreement about the services expected and response times guaranteed. Based on ITIL standards, the ConnectWise SLA management engine can treat clients' issues based on severity and impact.
• Service Reporting – To deliver exceptional service, you'll want to monitor your performance and trends; your clients will appreciate that information, too. ConnectWise provides metrics through Executive Reporting that provide visibility into key performance indicators.
• Service Asset and Configuration Management – To make sure you're providing appropriate services across all of your clients' IT assets in service, you need to stay on top of changes in network configurations. ConnectWise will make sure that you don't miss a domain name renewal, warranty expiration or any other key date associated with a client's infrastructure. Using the MSP add-on, you can also perform asset discovery.
• Change Management - Change management procedures are designed to ensure that standardized methods and procedures are used for efficient and prompt handling of all changes. By using good scheduling processes for planned changes, you can keep everyone informed with ConnectWise.
• Knowledge Management – Continuous learning from experience expands your team's base of knowledge and allows you to deliver the same quality of service faster with time—provided you know how to capture the knowledge.  ConnectWise  records and indexes work history with detailed, searchable data, so you never have to reinvent the wheel. You can also share information with customers via the Client Portal. 

For more information on how our ITIL-certified Service Professionals can help your business, contact us today!