IT Teams

  • 13 min read

6 Strategies to Establish A Culture Of IT Service Excellence

Rohit Rao

19th September, 2023

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IT managers and their teams can contribute more towards an organization’s growth when a successful IT service delivery strategy is in place. They can swiftly address pressing business challenges while minimizing risks, all by providing employees with the right tools and support.

This article explains how one can build an IT service culture that nurtures digital transformation, breaks siloes among departments, and turns the IT department into a catalyst for a digital cultural shift.

The role of the IT department is redefined now, and it has started contributing more towards your organization’s success by creating high-performing IT teams. They are achieving this by adopting the right tools to perform with higher operational efficiency, zero lags and delays, and allowing room for continuous improvement. 

Thus, in turn, they are able to find apt tools and technology for their users that align with the organizational goals and improve the bottom line.

Also, these teams can minimize the technological cost and allocate resources better, which drives higher adoption among users. This is achievable if you have a goal-oriented IT service strategy and follow the right measures to manage people, processes, and tools. 

Here are some of the core values that you and your IT team aim to achieve while building a culture of IT service excellence.

• Shared goals: Each of your IT team members has their own roles and responsibilities, but they work together towards a shared goal: helping end users get the best possible IT experience. An ideal, high-performing IT team has a shared goal and vision that every team member is aware of and accountable for contributing their best.

• They listen to end-users: Though you, as an IT manager, know what’s best for their teams, they actively collect user feedback to excel in their current service levels. They enable the end users to select the tech stack they want to work with instead of forcing them to use what’s available. 
  
  They have effective and transparent communication with every stakeholder, allowing them to share suggestions that help the company achieve digital transformation.

• Measurable objectives: They don’t have abstract goals; they have measurable objectives that are tracked regularly to improve the process further. 
  
  For example, they measure how quickly the team addresses the issue, when your IT team initiates the first contact, how fast user accesses are revoked when they are relieved from the company, and more. They have benchmarked IT service level standards to achieve that they push their team members to meet. 

• Smashed siloes: Though each department works on its respective tasks, functional silos are no more, preventing everyone from attaining the ultimate goal together. Communication flows freely from one unit to another as it should, and there is better collaboration without friction.

• Neat work practices: Your IT team follows a structured workflow for every support-related task. They rely on highly-functional, agile practices for seamless end-to-end user lifecycle management right from when a user joins the company till they depart. 
  
  They let automation take care of monotonous tasks and workflows that must be performed repetitively. This way, your IT team provides the best digital culture to the internal workforce, allowing them to work more efficiently and productively towards organizational goals.
  
  This article discusses the strategies that you can follow as an IT manager to build a culture of IT service excellence. 

6 Strategies To Build An IT Team That Delivers IT Service Excellence

The key to IT service delivery excellence is to adopt suitable strategies that focus on your user needs more rather than looking at problems and technological solutions as separate entities. Let’s explore the various strategies.

1. Review your current IT service strategy

Going back to your current processes and IT service delivery models will help you address the barriers to it. This includes reviewing everything from your policies and controls to service strategies and, more so, that you can align the compass toward IT service excellence and design the roadmap for it from where you are. 

You need to raise and answer questions about your service offerings, technology adoption, and user requirements. This way, you can understand everyone’s role in the IT department and define them more clearly. 

This review will also clarify what services your team is responsible for delivering to users, what their actual expectations are, and what has been the biggest setback in recent times that impacts other processes too.

You can understand what are the issues that need to be addressed, whether the tools used by your IT department are incompetent, the lack of transparency of how users consume digital tools, or whether poor communication that’s causing delays in the day-to-day tasks of your IT team, or it’s the lack of training among IT team members. 

As you see through the current strategy and pick out the chaotic parts, you can lay out a strategy that best fits your user’s requirements and where everyone’s role is clearly defined. 

2. Align your IT practices and tools with organizational values

Once you have created a streamlined IT strategy that will continue to operate and scale, it is time to align it with the respective period's business goals. You are already aware of the expectations your users have from your team, and you have derived your possible level of support. 

Now, you have to move the needle of your strategy to point out your organization’s objectives to use your resources and allocated budget wisely and produce higher ROI.

This step is often overlooked because IT managers often set forward strategies to follow and do it efficiently. But they don’t have any ways to measure its effectiveness as the end goal was set keeping only the IT department in mind. This is where business alignment helps. 

If you are unaware of the shared goals, with so many technological solutions around, it’s easy to lose focus and procure far more than needed, wasting money and complicating IT infrastructure. The end-user experience will not be ideal, too, as user expectations are a far cry from what your team’s service strategies point out.  

Nevertheless, adjusting your team’s goals with organizational goals makes it much easier to cater to user needs, fix issues as planned, and do your team’s part well. It further powers your team to invest in technologies that can boost your company’s growth. 

For instance, a new product is about to be launched. With the IT team’s full-on support, the time it takes to hit the market can reduce considerably. 

3. Build and nurture a winning team

One of the important aspects of IT service excellence is the people who are behind it. You need to hire and train the right people who can work with a people-first mentality and be eager to solve their technical problems at work. It totally lies in the manager’s hands to use the available resources and build a high-performance team that delivers what’s expected.

This starts right from hiring them. You must emphasize the job description and responsibilities to attract the right talent. These talents must be trained and communicated frequently about their goals and where they stand. 

As you know the strengths of these people, it will become much easier to group them and assign them responsibilities that they can handle smoothly. This is crucial because your IT team handles various kinds of issues and requests. Categorizing people and problems is the solution to addressing them fast without exploiting the workforce or making users wait. 

Other than this, appreciating them when they do a phenomenal job and asking about their concerns when they struggle with something are other duties that can get the best out of your helpdesk agents and other IT team members.

4. Choose the right tech stack to automate error-prone, manual tasks

Next to people, the tools decide your IT strategy delivery. Considering your team's requirements, you must select the right option for ticketing, incident management, and user lifecycle management (ULM). You need to keep in mind that these tools should also support when your team or organization scales up or when you require advanced functionality. 

Other factors to bear in mind are that the applications should have an integration facility, not let your team engage in repetitive, manual tasks, and allow applications to connect with other apps. This is crucial as it eliminates adding more applications to the stack or handling that manually. 

The next part is choosing the right application for every team's needs. Though every team gives utmost importance to choosing the right ticketing application, they don’t pay the same attention to ULM apps. 

The ULM applications can effectively manage users and allow them to access the right tools they are entitled to, from the stage where they are onboarded till their offboarding happens. This also has self-servicing options for users to place access requests or new software requests that your IT procurement team can purchase for them. 

This feature prevents many clogs and frictions in how users engage with your IT procurement team and vice versa. As the workflows (the series of steps involved in processing a user request) are automated, and the user is aware of its statuses as well, your IT team can work with more clarity and order without answering users or addressing requests one by one manually.

That’s how selecting the right tools makes a difference in your IT service delivery and allows you to move closer to service excellence. Any IT application that centralizes different functionalities and allows multiple users to work together while having user-friendly interfaces is ideal for your high-performing IT team.

5. Adapt an agile approach to stay proactive and accountable

Agility can help your IT department handle internal IT support efficiently and effortlessly while ensuring that users get the best IT experience. It’s about helping every team member to be fully productive, fixing their productivity leaks, communicating with the team ahead of time about any expected critical issues or increased workloads, and staying prepared to face any unexpected IT, security, or technical incidents.

Here are some of the best measures you can take to make your team more agile. 

• Delegating ownership and point of contact for different aspects of your IT helpdesk to distribute the workload evenly and make it more organized. 

• Encourage team participation and allow them to work towards the desired result. 

• Reducing the number of calls that IT agents and admins participate in daily for higher productivity and switching to productivity boards for clear updates from time to time.

• Show more importance to the kind of culture you want to set in your team and how your team must feel to be a part of your team and maintain it consistently.

• Measuring the performance of the individuals and team with the help of metrics, comparing it with predefined standards and targets to take the right measures for improvement.

Agility in your IT service department also includes being highly reactive to feedback and implementing them right away, which is explained in the next section.   

6. Making progress through continuous service improvement (CSI)

Your current IT service strategy might look great as a plan. But it needs consistent feedback from stakeholders that has to be performed in loops for continuous improvement and excellence. For starters, you can accept feedback from users about the level of service and find out what didn’t go well with them. These are the inputs that the IT manager must implement in an agile manner.

This instant improvement makes your users feel valued and becomes a positive experience for them. Keep looking for areas of improvement and redesign your IT strategy to suit this CSI. For proactive feedback, agents can send surveys instantly, and the user response can be used to gauge user effort scores and user satisfaction levels, along with an option to provide qualitative feedback.

While you take care of all these processes and improvement measures, encouraging your users to be empathetic also adds value and fills any gap in your current service delivery. 

Besides user feedback, your team should also conduct regular internal audits on IT tools and processes to maintain compliance and mitigate potential risks and security threats.

How Zluri Helps You Take A Step Closer To Achieving IT Service Excellence

It takes an inclusive effort from every involved tool and person to inch away from a standard IT service to IT service excellence. Any tool you use to bridge the current gaps in your IT service strategy plays a huge role and can make or break the outcome you intend to achieve. That’s why you need to select an effective platform that covers a wide range of features. 

For instance, user lifecycle management tools like Zluri can help you manage the entire lifecycle of users within an organization by enabling your team to process automated provisioning, deprovisioning, and mid-life access management. 

Build IT Service Excellence With Zluri’s Automated Provisioning & Deprovisioning

Zluri lets you automate difficult, time-consuming tasks of the IT department, like user onboarding and offboarding. It requires the least amount of work from your IT admins or team and executes it without errors on time so that users get access only to the required tools when they join, and it’s revoked when they leave.

You can customize the approval workflows too and allow users to gain access to certain applications without approvals too. This can save much time and help a new user gain instant access without waiting. 

• Automated provisioning

To process user provisioning, you don’t even need to enter details of new users into the system but allow the application to sync it directly from the HRMS platform through open surface integration. Hence, new user names will be automatically available for onboarding from there; it is just a few clicks process.

Providing, especially during mass onboarding, is a major headache for your IT team as they must perform it meticulously for each user separately. This can often delay the whole process and affect other concurrent IT tasks, and users don’t get access immediately too. But, Zluri presents everything they need in one platform and allows them to process it in one click. 

The picture below shows you can access your recently created, in-progress, and most used playbooks under the onboarding window.

Here is how you can create an automated workflow for provisioning and save them as playbooks for your next use.

1. Start from Workflows -> Onboarding -> New workflow to initiate onboarding and fetch users ready for onboarding.

   

   

2. Choose the user's name from the window that pops up, or you can search for their name from the list too. It also allows selecting multiple users. Select and press continue.

   

   

3. You can start providing access to the required applications on the left side. No need to search for applications as Zluri suggests contextual-based app recommendations on previously processed requests. You can click on these apps, set permission levels, and provide access to other groups and channels.

   

   

4. Zluri also offers in-app suggestions to automate other provisioning tasks, like sending an automated invite to add the user to the Slack communication channel to receive app-related updates.

   

   

5. To further simplify these processes, you can save the workflows as “playbooks” and use them in the future when you have to onboard or offboard someone in a similar position. 

   

   

6. This saved workflow will be available under Workflows -> onboarding -> Playbooks. You can use this to avoid repeating the same steps and perform provisioning in a few seconds as the application and access data are pre-filled.

   

   

• Automated deprovisioning 

Similarly, IT teams can remove and revoke SaaS access while users leave the organization to seal your company’s private data and prevent security breaches. Instant deprovisioning is as essential for your organization’s safety as leaving old employees. 

To nurture a culture of IT service excellence, having a quick and automated offboarding is a must. 

Similar to onboarding, Zluri has a module for offboarding too, where you can access recently edited and used playbooks and create a new offboarding workflow too (refer to the picture below).

Here is how Zluri processes quick and smooth offboarding with Zluri.

1. Create an offboarding workflow on Zluri from Workflows -> Offboarding. Click on the ‘new workflow’ to initiate offboarding.

   

   

2. Here you will see users who are ready to get offboarded, meaning their identities will be deleted, and their SaaS access will be removed. Select users and then continue to the next stage.

   

   

3. In the upcoming window, Zluri will show you recommended actions to remove users access completely and remove them from groups. You can click on them as suggested and revoke user access. 

   

   

4. It’s advisable to save the workflow as you can use it for deprovisioning users in the future. You can use the option ‘save as playbook’. If you want to execute the workflow right away, you can click on ‘run’ so that accesses get removed right away.

   

   

   Thus, Zluri allows you to achieve zero-touch provisioning and deprovisioning, which can otherwise be an exhaustive experience for users and the IT team. No matter how many users get onboard or offboard, IT teams can perform it seamlessly, without errors.

Leverage Zluri’s Self-Servicing Platform for Streamlining Your IT Services 

There will be instances where users might require a new SaaS application or a replacement for an older platform. They might directly sign up for them and start using them or request the IT team to procure them through a standard ticket. 

Both are complicated as the first scenario leads to shadow IT, whereas the second leads to delays due to broken communication and siloed processes.

On the other hand, a self-servicing platform like Zluri’s Employee App Store gives a transparent way for users to know the approved applications used within the organization and gain access to them. Unlike the manual method, where employees had to request your IT team for approvals through tickets and wait, Zluri's EAS makes it go ticketless. 

With EAS, you can decide exactly what your employees can see. For instance, you can pick which apps they have access to and what information about those apps they can view.

Moreover, you have the power to decide who's in charge of approving things and what they should do. You can include department leaders, app owners, and others. This helps everyone work together better during the approval process.

For instance, when it comes to apps already in use at your organization, you can let the department or team leader be the main approver, or you can involve the app owner. But for new apps that your organization hasn't used before, you can also include the procurement and finance teams in the approval process.

In addition, with the “changelog,” your employees can easily track updates on their requests. This includes things like knowing when a request is approved or rejected, any changes to the license duration or tier, and any comments made by an admin.

Achieve IT Service Excellence with Zluri’s SaaS Management Platform

Zluri also helps your IT admin to keep track of the SaaS subscriptions in one place, maintain contracts and documents, and identify their compliance certifications. It also sends reminders when SaaS applications are due for renewal, which helps make prompt renewal decisions about continuing or discarding the subscription. 

Your team also gains a deeper understanding of the consumption of SaaS applications which is very important to track if you want to know whether your investment pays any value in return.

Zluri also helps with the SaaS management part, where you can centrally manage your SaaS applications, their security and compliance aspects, spending, licenses, and more. It uses its powerful discovery engine to identify SaaS applications used in your organization with the help of various sources, present them in the platform, and allow you to track them consistently. 

Alternatively, if you use spreadsheets or any other SaaS monitoring tools, it can be hard to gain this instant visibility into your stack, let alone manage it with higher control. This inefficiency can also reflect in the way you deliver your IT service to users and create disruption in their work too. 

For example, you follow an outdated SaaS application management, but some user groups want access to a particular application. It can take a while for your IT team to understand their concern, check if the application is already available for use, push it to the concerned team for purchasing, get it approved by the respective leads, and finally provide access after procurement. 

It can take up to 5 to 10 business days for this whole process to unfold, but it still isn’t efficient as you go back to your outdated SaaS stack and engage your team to discover and collect information about applications in usage. 

This is why you need an advanced SMP platform that Zluri has through which you can manage your SaaS applications and users, applications, groups, and every other important aspect in a 360-degree view. 

Refer to the picture below that explains how Zluri offers detailed insights on every application added to your stack and updates it regularly.

Another example of how Zluri simplifies the work for IT managers and presents them with the most-useful SaaS spending and optimization insights. 

Refer to the picture below, where Zluri displays how much you have saved from your total SaaS spending, how much you have saved on each application spend, and more. This will be helpful for you to plan and execute their IT SaaS cost reduction strategies, as SaaS expenses can easily go out of control if left unchecked.

These intuitive features reduce IT managers' time to understand the complex SaaS management functions, which take up most of their time, and make the best out of the SaaS investment. They can also thwart major security issues and attacks and manage compliance requirements with the help of Zluri.

Zluri also has integrations where you can integrate your SaaS applications with it to manage and track its performance at granular levels and extend the capabilities of Zluri. 

As you overcome these SaaS management challenges, you can maintain one source of truth for all of your SaaS assets, offer the best tech stack and support to your users, and inch close toward IT service excellence. 

Following is a detailed breakdown of Zluri’s most useful features and how it reduces the burden on your IT team, admins, and managers and improves operational efficiency while securing the SaaS landscape.

Book a demo today!

About the author

Rohit Rao

Rohit works in the Community and Marketing Team of Zluri and is a strong advocate of community led growth.