Shift Left: ITSM automation domination

Many organizations struggle to keep up with the high demand without proper use of IT Service Management (ITSM). 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, instead of continually improving, 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 with ITSM processes and problem management.

Quick take: How does Shift Left move your work?

Shift left in ITSM is a strategy that involves moving IT processes earlier in the operational life cycle. This proactive style can improve service reliability, reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction. Though, it is an evolving practice that requires constant revisitation and reevaluation here are some key takeaways: 

• You can use the shift-left move to automate processes and resolve issues automatically, or empower users to resolve their own issues as a more efficient asset management.
• It allows you to share knowledge throughout the organization or the information technology infrastructure library (ITIL) so that less experienced staff can answer more complex questions.
• You can integrate with development tools will help source code management tools to automate development processes.
• Shift left is a concept that aims to shorten resolution times overall as a management self-service.

Shift Left: IT Service Management (ITSM)

Shifting left aims 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 resolution time and minimize the chaos caused by service request mess. For example, implementing a searchable 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 tailored to your organization's unique culture. However, the existence of a portal alone won’t solve anything without shifting left.

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. Here are some benefits of a shift-left strategy:

• Shift left is a concept that aims to shorten resolution time and save time and money by resolving issues earlier in the development lifecycle for both users and configuration items.
• By embedding security assessments and checks into the earliest stages of development, security is improved.
• Improves customer satisfaction by sharing knowledge throughout the organization, therefor customer questions are answered more easily, quickly, and to greater satisfaction.

Benefits and resolution: Leverage automation

The shift left approach also places a strong emphasis on automation. Your ITIL and IT organizations desk should optimize and utilize automation to release the necessary capacity to change and eliminate their technology debt and bridge the gap between the limited supply of IT support staff and the increasing demand for IT services– here are 4 reasons why:

1. Automation can enhance the speed, value, and quality of IT services and free up labor capacity to redirect technical resources to more important activities.
2. 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.
3. Chatbots and virtual agents can 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.
4. Dominate level zero with Atlassian products that have extensive automation capabilities that can empower your organization to dominate and change the day, not just survive it.

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 subtasks 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 subtask, you can set up a rule to automatically transition the parent issue if there are no additional unresolved subtasks.

Implications of AI

The integration of AI into the shift left philosophy significantly enhances the effectiveness and efficiency of its knowledge management. Where it aims to move problem resolution closer to the front line by empowering end-users and lower-tier support with tools and knowledge to handle issues traditionally escalated to higher tiers, AI amplifies this approach by providing advanced automation, predictive analytics, and intelligent self-service capabilities– here’s how:

• AI-driven chatbots, for instance, can handle routine queries and troubleshooting, freeing up human agents for more complex tasks.
• Predictive analytics can preemptively identify and address potential issues before they impact users.
• AI can continuously analyze and optimize processes, ensuring faster resolution times and improving overall service quality.
• This results in reduced operational costs, increased user satisfaction, and a more agile IT environment that can quickly adapt to changing demands.

A day in the life without shifting left

On a typical day, in what you would call a non-optimized organization without a shift-left approach, 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, service delivery, or business goals. 

These tickets come from employees who need assistance due to unresponsive tools, and from systems that monitor the status of important services which can make the user experience feel tedious. 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 as a form of knowledge management.

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

Humans 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 up-time, 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 the digital transformation of business services. It’s no wonder that burnout is so common among service desk personnel. So, when in doubt, it's better to opt for shift-left success.

Shift left: Final take

When you shift-left for the IT service desk, there are a number of ways using automation can improve and change ITIL, monitoring and moving security and IT service management processes in a more efficient direction. Within your organization, there are likely dozens if not hundreds of other opportunities to automate routine rules or tasks, reduce self-service and the human input required, and, as Atlassian puts it, unleash the potential of every team's true value.