Shift Left: Automate and Dominate ITSM

Many organizations struggle to keep up with the high demand for IT services due to a lack of capacity within their IT teams. This is often caused by the large amount of time and resources spent on operational tasks such as incident response and routine maintenance, leaving little room for project work. As a result, the organization's technical debt increases and it falls behind industry peers who have modernized and streamlined their IT support. On the other hand, organizations that have optimized their IT support models are able to allocate resources towards projects that align with their strategic goals, and reduce their technical debt. 

A Day in the Life

On a typical day in a non-optimized organization, a support agent starts by accessing their ITSM tool. Here they find a large number of incident tickets, many of which have exceeded the set service-level objective. These tickets come from employees who need assistance due to unresponsive tools, and from systems that monitor the status of important services. The agent categorizes the tickets based on priority and age, and then works through the oldest and most critical ones first in a systematic way.

Unfortunately, by the time the agent accesses the systems to gather diagnostic information, the situation may have already changed and symptoms may have subsided, making the initial diagnostic information irrelevant. As a result, the agent may close the ticket as a false alert and proceed to the next one in the queue. This process continues until the end of the shift, and the cycle begins again with the next agent. It’s considered a good day when the agent is able to reduce the number of incident tickets in the queue and maybe assist some people during their shift. Wash, rinse, repeat.

This situation is a common occurrence for many organizations and their support staff, happening around the clock, every day of the year. Not only does it consume a significant amount of technical resources, but it also has a negative cumulative impact. When diagnostic information is not obtained promptly as part of the incident management process, it hinders the organization's ability to identify and address the underlying cause of incidents. As a result, the volume of incidents increases and consumes more IT resources.

If all you know how to do is fight fires, your strategy is limited to requesting more firefighters. 

People alone are unable to reverse this trend and eliminate the accumulated technical debt that has built up over the years. They cannot be expected to improve their current processes while also meeting the uptime, response time, and resolution time service levels of new digital business services. Nevertheless, organizations still rely on manual labor to address legacy issues and support digital transformation of business services. It’s no wonder that burnout is so common among service desk personnel. 

Shift Left

"Shifting left" is a popular strategy to improve customer experience, reduce costs, and simplify support activities by moving request fulfillment as close to the front line and customers as possible. This approach helps speed up the time to resolution and minimize the chaos of service request mess. For example, implementing a searchable knowledge base or customizing request intake forms to gather relevant information can help deflect tickets and streamline the support process.

To provide a seamless customer experience, it's important to centralize help-seeking resources in one easily accessible location. This can be achieved by creating a self-service portal that is tailored to the unique culture of your organization. However, the existence of a portal alone won’t solve anything. It's important to avoid the mistakes of other companies by ensuring that the portal is user-friendly and easy to find. Even the most robust self-service system is ineffective if customers can’t find it.

Leverage Automation

The shift left approach also places a strong emphasis on automation. IT organizations should utilize automation to release the necessary capacity to eliminate their technology debt and bridge the gap between the limited supply of IT support staff and the increasing demand for IT services. Automation can enhance the speed and quality of IT services, as well as free up labor capacity to redirect technical resources to more important activities. It also improves self-service capabilities by reducing repetitive tasks for IT teams and enhancing communication with customers. For example, automation of follow-up communications accelerates resolution time, predefined responses to certain requests enhance the customer experience, and routing service requests to the appropriate team results in faster resolution. Additionally, chatbots and virtual agents can be used to provide a personalized experience across desktop and mobile, by utilizing the company's existing service catalog and knowledge base articles to promptly resolve common requests.

Dominate Level Zero

Atlassian products have extensive automation capabilities that can empower your organization to dominate the day, not just survive it. Some examples include:

Auto-assigning issues to your team

• How does your team handle unassigned issues? Often teams leave this to the discretion of their engineers, which can result in some unassigned issues slipping through the cracks. 
• As an example, you can use automation to combat this by auto-assigning issues to members of your team in a balanced fashion.

Scheduling tasks

• Automatically scheduling tasks not only reduces manual work for your team, but also ensures consistency and reliability in your workflow. 
• For example, if a customer hasn’t responded to your support engineer’s query on an issue, you can configure a rule to automatically send them a reminder and temporarily close the stale issue.

Integrating with your development tools (Bitbucket, Github, Gitlab)

• Automation integrates with your source code management tool to allow you to automate your development processes. 
• For example, when a pull request is merged, you might want to transition a related issue to Rolling Out if a feature flag is linked to it. If not, you would transition the issue to Done.

Synchronizing parent issues and sub-tasks

• When dealing with sub-tasks and their parent issues, it’s important to ensure related issues are kept in sync. Automation makes this easy using branch rules. 
• For example, when you resolve a sub-task, you can set up a rule to automatically transition the parent issue if there are no additional unresolved sub-tasks.

These are just some examples of ways to shift left using automation. Within your organization, there are likely dozens if not hundreds of other opportunities to automate routine rules or tasks, reduce the human input required, and, as Atlassian puts it, unleash the potential of every team.