ITSM Best Practices: 3 Bottlenecks Slowing Down IT Teams (and How to Fix Them)
This article was written in cooperation with @Katie Lai - Seibert from Seibert and @Prisca Fey - codefortynine from codefortynine.
IT teams play a central role in achieving organizational objectives and are no longer limited to traditional support functions. Delays in service delivery affect operations, reduce productivity, and negatively impact employee and customer satisfaction as well as revenue. Accelerating IT Service Management (ITSM) enhances service reliability and responsiveness by making workflows more effective, automating repetitive activities, and improving transparency across incidents, service requests, changes, and problem management processes.
ITSM sits at the heart of modern organizations. As software-powered services expand, IT teams enable employees and teams to deliver value more quickly. IT has shifted from supporting the business to differentiating it, making collaboration, usability, and speed essential in modern ITSM approaches.
In this article, we break down three of the most common ITSM bottlenecks: lost escalation context, tool-hopping, and limited workload visibility — and share practical approaches to eliminating each one.
What “accelerating ITSM” actually means
Accelerating ITSM is about increasing reliability and responsiveness across incidents, service requests, changes, and problem management, without sacrificing quality. In practice, faster ITSM usually comes from:
- Optimizing workflows (fewer manual steps, more transparency)
- Automating repetitive actions (especially at handoffs)
- Improving transparency (so teams can prioritize and coordinate with real signals)
A structured ITSM approach helps standardize service delivery, reduce costs and risks, align IT with business goals, and improve customer-facing and staff-facing services.
3 frictions that slow ITSM down
Service teams are expected to resolve issues quickly, regardless of request volume or complexity. That’s why processes need to be as frictionless as possible. Sustainable speed doesn’t come from added pressure; it comes from removing avoidable errors and delays: missing context during handoffs, lost focus and time from constant context switching, and limited visibility into workloads across teams and spaces.
Escalations slow down when context gets lost
When service tickets are escalated from the service team to the development team, small details can sometimes add up to real delays.
Common symptoms
- Repeated follow-up questions
- Duplicate troubleshooting
- SLA risk due to re-triage and unclear priority rules
Typical root causes
- Handoffs that include only a short summary
- Missing required fields, incomplete ticket history, or absent decision context
- Manual steps that lead to errors and inconsistency
What to do about it
- Define a standard for ticket escalation (priorisation + required fields)
- Ensure key troubleshooting steps and decisions are captured in the ticket
- Automate the handoff so context is carried over consistently
What to measure
- Back-and-forth comment loops
- Time to first response by the receiving team
- SLA breach rate for escalated tickets
How Deep Clone for Jira eliminates escalation delays
A proven method to reduce friction in cross-team escalation is to standardize the handoff and automate it so no context is lost.
One app available in the Atlassian Marketplace that supports this approach is Deep Clone for Jira. It reduces handover delays by making the escalation from Jira Service Management to development a repeatable process with all context needed.
Instead of manually recreating a ticket for 2nd-line support or development, teams can clone the original ticket into the target software project while carrying over crucial information such as comments, forms, attachments and other relevant issue content.
During the escalation, fields can be edited or updated automatically so the development ticket can be processed directly.
Deep Clone Presets enable predefined cloning settings that ensure consistent handoffs and prevent errors, while Deep Clone workflow post functions can automatically trigger cloning during an "Escalate" transition to save time and eliminate manual steps entirely.
Tool-hopping breaks flow and focus
Frequent switching between different tools and screens, especially when key escalation data is not available in the JSM ticket but must be retrieved from CRM and asset management systems, disrupts the workflow and distracts attention.
Common symptoms
- Agents spend significant time searching for customer, asset, or contract data
- Details get copied manually into the ticket, increasing the risk of errors
- Escalations slow down during peak workload because cognitive load is high
Typical root causes
- Key escalation context lives outside the ticket (CRM, asset/CMDB, billing systems)
- Information isn’t available when needed
- Teams rely on manual copy/paste instead of structured fields
What to do about it
- Bring the required external context into the ticket view
- Set-up structured fields for decision-relevant information
- Automate ticket updates based on your external data sources
What to measure
- Number of data sources touched per ticket
- Time spent searching and validating information
- Data quality issues like missing fields and outdated values
How External Data for Jira Fields reduces tool-hopping
Bringing external data like CRM or Asset Data directly into JSM so agents don’t need to leave the ticket can transform the way teams work.
One app that supports this “in-ticket context” approach in real-time is External Data for Jira Fields.
With the full context available directly in the ticket, teams can make better decisions. Instead of handling many separate integrations, the app connects multiple data sources, saving time and cutting licence costs for third party platforms.
Limited workload visibility across teams and projects
Leaders and teams often can’t see workload and blockers clearly across projects or service lines. Without a shared, real-time overview of capacities and requirements, it is difficult to set priorities and redistribute work before problems become urgent.
Common symptoms
- Cluttered dashboards with different parameters
- Uneven work load distribution and overloaded team members
- Difficulty to set priorities and reallocate work
Typical root causes
- Work spread across projects without consolidated dashboards
- No shared, real-time view of work across teams and projects
- Blocker and workload imbalances detected too late
What to do about it
- Create a shared operational view in one dashboard
- Use consistent parameters so work can be compared across teams
- Check team workload regularly to identify potential bottlenecks early
What to measure
- How long work items or tickets remain in a status
- Duration of work is delayed due to dependencies or delays
- Number of tickets or tasks per team or service
- Track trends, not just snapshots, to see workload patterns
How Quick Filters for Jira Dashboards improves workload visibility
Teams often build consolidated dashboards and rely on interactive filtering to slice by project, assignee, component, sprint, etc., without rebuilding each gadget view. One app that supports interactive dashboard filtering with one single controller is Quick Filters for Jira Dashboards.
Quick Filters helps track workload and team health by aggregating story points or other Jira number fields using Statistics and Chart gadgets.
Teams compare estimated vs. actual time to spot estimation gaps, improve forecasting, and catch bottlenecks early to rebalance workload and increase efficiency.
Takeaway
Accelerating ITSM is about making IT more reliable, visible, and proactive. By preventing lost context in escalations, minimizing tool-hopping, and improving workload visibility, organizations can optimize workflows, reduce bottlenecks, and improve team health by reducing overload and enabling higher-quality service delivery. Effective ITSM transforms IT from a support function into a strategic enabler of business value and increases customer and staff satisfaction, and builds trust.
If you need help setting up your organization’s service delivery using Jira Service Management, reach out to the team at Seibert Solutions. They offer a range of solutions to help you configure JSM to fit your business’ needs.
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Valeria Ehrenberg - codefortynine
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