Embrace Agile ITSM with Akshay Anand

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Our team is back from the Service Desk & IT Support Show (SITS) – Europe’s largest (free) ITSM education program and it was packed with insights and great conversations.

Atlassian Principal Solution Engineer Akshay Anand presented a compelling session on Embracing Agile ITSM and we wanted to share some key takeaways with our community who couldn’t make it. Want to jump in? Check out the entire presentation here or schedule a demo.

Below you’ll find an outline of what was presented and an overview of these key takeaways:

1. Agility in ITSM requires the adoption of core agile principles

2. Agile ITSM requires support from across the organisation

3. Jira Service Management can help unlock Agile ITSM in every organisation.

Let’s dive in!

With the rise and prevalence of agile methods in development and organisations, there has long been a need for operations to shift to a more agile way of working to keep up. IT service management teams, whether part of support desks, incident and change enablement, or IT Operations need to embrace agility or they risk becoming obsolete.

What is an agile methodology for Operations?

Agile highlights flexible and rapidly responding operations as a critical foundation for enabling fast and fluid translation of innovative initiatives in the face of changes

Download this whitepaper to learn more.

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Why is agility important for IT Operations

Agile Service Management is the application of Agile principles to ITSM:

• Transparency - processes and work must be visible to those performing the work as well as those receiving the work

• Inspection - The outcomes and progress towards goals must be closely and frequently looked at with the intention of finding variances or problems

• Adaptation - If the process or the outcome of the process is not working, then the process being applied or the materials being produced must be adjusted

The fourth, Atlassian principle

In addition to these 3 core principles, you also need Team Centricity, meaning that teams need the autonomy to design their work while staying aligned with each other. With Jira Service Management:

• Software, IT/SM, and business teams can collaborate while remaining autonomous

• Each team can define its own processes and automation

• Individual agents can collaborate across different projects

Agile ways of working highlight flexible and responsive operations as the basis for innovation to occur quickly and smoothly. In short, when IT Operations teams embrace agility, they’re ensuring the practices they set are not only followed but embraced by teams.

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What does agility look like in IT Operations?

• Organizing work in terms of "practices" can empower team-centric ways of working

• Team-centric ways of working allow different teams to implement appropriate work intake & prioritisation procedures

• Adopting a common platform across different teams and types of work encourages cooperation & collaboration

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Challenges can you expect to face when embracing agility

• Agile ITSM requires support from management and leadership to enable team-centricity, allow autonomy for teams, and provide organisational goal alignment cross-functionally

• Traditional solutions can constrain agility as they are often inflexible to dynamic business priorities, reinforce siloed knowledge and sharing, and impose friction across teams

• ITSM work is not always planned – developing processes to respond quickly while continuing to tackle existing plans can be tricky

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Jira Service Management was built to help weave agile principles into the IT Operations workflows

• Jira Service Management provides Transparency & Adaptation

  • Visualise all work within a project

  • Visualise all work within a project

• Jira Service Management provides Adaptation & Inspection

  • Automation & context for quicker completion of tasks

  • Multiple channels of communication that can enable fast communication and feedback

• Jira Service Management provides Transparency & Inspection

  • Identify trends across your organisation

  • Build trust with centralized incident communication

Get access to the full deck here or schedule a demo to learn more about how Jira Service Management was created to provide the blend of team autonomy and centralised administration and governance that can help unlock Agile ITSM in every organisation.