We are now in full swing with our Service Management series and are back for part 3! If you missed parts 1 or 2 you can catch up here. This week’s topic is about managing change within a technology infrastructure and the importance of this within Service Management as a whole. We continue our journey of building solid foundations and ensuring change is not only carried out but that it happens successfully. 

Making change happen

Change is at the heart of progress when it comes to Service Management, however, orchestrating it effectively within complex environments can be a challenge. It’s not just about implementing new systems or updating existing features, it’s about ensuring these changes fit seamlessly into the current estate. This means evaluating the environment, implementing changes, and trialling them – making sure they happen at the right time in the right place and are successful. 

Fulfilling change promises 

Change initiatives often come with grand promises of dramatically improving tech, but that’s not always the case, sometimes they’re just a small adjustment to keep things running smoothly for both the organisation and customers. A crucial step in change management is evaluating the change post-implementation – ensuring all that was promised actually followed through. For instance, if the change was meant to solve an issue or update a particular system, the team should check this actually happened and all the parts are now working as expected. 

Successfully carrying out change is one thing, but it is important to make sure the required change happens to all of the necessary items, not just some of them, and at the right time. By proactively planning and considering the need for change to align with the organisation’s requirements, the team can effectively manage the transition process. With these measures in place, the team can prioritise and stay ahead of the change and ensure that it is carried out in the desired timeframe. As a result, the likelihood of any disruptions or system outages is minimised. 

Navigating successful change initiatives

If you’ve read our previous blogs in this series, you’ll know exactly what Guardian is and how it can help with your Service Management needs. If you haven’t, then check out the last blog post for the low down – Enhancing incident management: How to streamline your efficiency.

Previously, we’ve discussed how Guardian is a great partner to have in the realm of Service Management, but let’s delve into how it can specifically assist you in change management. One of Guardian’s key roles is overseeing changes and monitoring upcoming ones, relieving the Change Management team of this responsibility and allowing them to focus their efforts on enabling change to occur and undertaking their vital oversight function. 

If you wish to discuss this topic further or just come and say hello, we will be at DTX Europe on the 4th and 5th of October – located in booth L30 in the ServiceDesk zone.

Not attending DTX Europe this year? Get in contact today, to discover how Cloudhouse can help you.

If you’ve been following our Service Management series up to this point, you’ll know that we’re going to be at DTX Europe this year. We wanted to use the series to demonstrate our focus at DTX Europe: Service Management and the surrounding elements that keep it ticking. 

So, it’s time to give you all the details you need to find us at the event. Whether you want to discuss any of the aspects covered in the series further or just want to say hello, we’re a friendly bunch so do make sure you visit us. 

When?

Wednesday, 4 October: 09:30 – 17:30

Thursday, 5 October: 09:30 – 16:30

Where?

Venue: ExCeL London

Zone: ServiceDesk

Stand: L30

Located near: Next to the IT Ops and Service Management Stage

The interesting stuff

Our CTO, Nick, is giving a talk titled ‘The Long Shadow of IT: Orderly society or the Wild West?’ on Thursday afternoon, so make sure you come along and have a listen! All location details for the speech are listed below:

Stage: IT Ops and Service Management

Date: Thursday, October 5th

Time: 12.10pm – 12.35pm

We’ll also be available at our stand all day, for both days, to chat about and demonstrate our trusted product, Guardian. We’re giving full demos so you’ll be able to see the tool in action and get any questions you may have about it answered. 

Guardian is a configuration drift detection and management system that allows businesses to continuously monitor their entire system estate for updates and potential threats. So if this sounds like something you’re interested in or just want to gain a bit more insight about, come and see us at our stand. 

The important stuff

If you haven’t already registered for DTX Europe 2023, here’s the link to do so! We look forward to seeing you!Not attending DTX Europe this year? Get in touch today to discover how Cloudhouse can help you.

Welcome to the second instalment in our newly launched Service Management series! In this blog post, we explore the pivotal role of effective incident management and the importance of data in achieving smooth service delivery. We’re also going to discuss how you can use specific tools to enhance your incident management process and as a result, heighten efficiency. 

Building foundations

In order to build effective incident management systems, you’ll need to start by understanding what it actually means to efficiently resolve incidents. 

At its core, incident management involves the resolution of unforeseen disruptions in service delivery. This could be due to a fault in the system, a change that has gone undetected, a change that didn’t quite go according to plan, human error or many other reasons. A good incident management process has the ability to swiftly navigate and overcome any hiccups, big or small, and restore systems to their normal operations while ensuring minimal impact. 

Effective incident management usually comes down to having the right data, at the right time, for the right job. Having the right tools and the right data at the right time can improve resolution time, improve customer satisfaction and enhance the profile of your Incident handling teams within the organisation.

Guardian – the ultimate tool

Cloudhouse Guardian is a powerful, vendor-agnostic tool that continuously monitors your entire technology estate, providing transparency into the changes occurring in your environment – approved, or not. By providing critical data to understand incidents, Guardian expedites the resolution process, allowing the Incident Management team to quickly address disruption. This not only saves resources and time but also enhances incident detection and management automatically.

With its versatile capabilities that help streamline incident handling, Guardian excels in collecting and processing data, providing valuable insights for swift and accurate resolutions. Integrating this tool with your incident management framework enables organisations to quickly respond to incidents and mitigate potential damage. 

When seamlessly integrating Guardian into your Service Management processes, it silently performs essential work in the background; detecting and notifying the incident team of any issues. This ensures swift action and efficient resolution. To learn more about Guardian’s role in service management, check out the previous episode in this series – Navigating the world of Service Management.

All about the data 

In today’s fast-paced environment, the ability to handle unexpected disruptions quickly and effectively is crucial. Guardian enriches your existing Incident Management framework by providing transparency into the environment. However, Guardian doesn’t just speed up the process, it also produces valuable data for your Service Management teams to utilise in the future. Analysing the data helps to determine likely causes and patterns in disruption that can then be addressed proactively to minimise disruption or eliminate them altogether. 

So, to reiterate the point made at the beginning of this blog, effective Incident Management is all about having the right data, at the right time, for the right job. 

If you wish to discuss this topic further or just come and say hello, we will be at DTX Europe on the 4th and 5th of October – located in booth L30 in the ServiceDesk zone.

Not attending DTX Europe this year? Get in contact today, to discover how Cloudhouse can help you.

As we gear up for DTX Europe on the 4-5th October 2023, we’re excited to be starting a new series dedicated to everything Service Management. The aim of this series is to understand the importance of Service Management while exploring how to implement it seamlessly into service delivery. 

To kick off, let’s start by unravelling the foundations of Service Management, its role in delivering great customer experiences and some of the challenges. 

What is Service Management and why is it important?

The role of ‘Service Management’ is to provide services to IT that enable the smooth delivery of services to end users or consumers of them. Service Management teams tend to follow ITIL-based frameworks and processes. This enables them to deliver services in a standard way and benefit from industry best practices. 

You will likely know them as the Service Desk, Change Management, Configuration Management and Service Delivery teams, each with their own core responsibilities but together ensuring that IT delivers and runs services to a standard set of practices with the minimum of disruption to the rest of the organisation.

Service Management detection and challenges 

So what does service management actually entail? There are several practices and they vary from organisation to organisation but essentially you will have a group handling Incidents (interruptions to services that are unplanned or unexpected by the consumer of that service), Problems (looking at systemic issues within the IT Infrastructure and services), Change Management/Enablement (ensuring that change within the infrastructure and applications is undertaken in a coordinated fashion and with as little disruption to consumers as possible) and Configuration Management (Configuration Managers are responsible for ensuring that the IT estate is understood, provide a point of reference and documented, usually but not necessarily in a CMDB supporting the other teams in their goals).

For instance, at Cloudhouse, if an issue affects more than 50 people and persists for a long time, it is known as a ‘major incident.’ This term emphasises the urgency and scale of the issue; demanding immediate attention. When an issue persists and is not easily resolved, Service Management professionals begin a ‘problem investigation.’ This phase requires an examination of the technical infrastructure. The objective is to uncover the probable causes behind the issue or a series of related issues. 

Service Management teams work to determine where the issue started, what caused it, and how it has developed (if at all). The first step they need to take is to look over the last 24 hours; combing through recent changes and activity to pinpoint what might have triggered an error in the system. It could be due to a software update, a security breach or a software bug.

After sifting through the possibilities and once the Service Management teams have identified the cause, they then look into fixing it. Once they have identified a fix, they engage the Change Management/Enablement teams to identify the best time for implementation, while understanding the urgency, risk and approach for minimising impact to those unaffected. Additionally, the teams will ensure that the plans are in place to ensure the problem is not only resolved but also prevented from recurring.

The scenario above is of course a vastly simplified scenario and situations and conditions vary from organisation to organisation so your mileage may differ. However, as a high-level illustration, this is the general approach.

Simplifying Service Management

How can we help you enhance and enrich your Service Management processes? Cloudhouse Guardian is a configuration drift detection and management system that allows businesses to continuously monitor their entire system estate for updates and potential threats. As well as many other benefits, it allows your Service Management teams to have visibility over their systems and reduces the time taken to identify changes that have occurred within your estate. Ultimately cutting down the time to get an issue resolved and a customer back up and running. 

If you wish to discuss this topic further or just come and say hello, we will be at DTX Europe on the 4th and 5th of October – located in booth L30 in the ServiceDesk zone.

Not attending DTX Europe this year? Get in contact today, to discover how Cloudhouse can help you.