Are you a business owner trying to make thing work a little smoother, or are in charge of a small IT team and want to make life easier for your end-users? Do tight budgets and time restraints have you feeling you can’t put anything in place to improve how things work? Do not despair, there’s something you can do!
You don’t need to be an ITIL-certified master to improve your IT operations and help your team and your end-users (More on that here if you want to learn more about ITIL in the future). There are still some easy IT best-practices you can apply right away, that could make a big difference for you and your business. I’ll provide you with info on five IT best practices that you can (and should) use in your day-to-day business activities like your service delivery or support request management.
Design a roadmap to have a clear vision of what you need to do. Before starting anything, you should always take the time to analyze and assess your current situation. A roadmap, in IT or anywhere else, describes where you are and where you want to go. You can make this roadmap as detailed as you would like, but it should contain at the very least those elements to be considered a roadmap: An initial assessment of your situation and of your objectives, the planning of what is required to reach those objectives, the implementation and deployment process of those requirements, and finally, continuous improvement and support after the implementation. Those steps are cyclical and never stop, once you have implemented what you needed to implement, you must first check if it did indeed solve your issue. If it didn’t, well, it’s back to step 1 and if it did work, you should still monitor regularly your new changes, in order to see if it still works of if it could be done better (more on that last point below).
Processes are a huge part of your IT operations (and a huge part of life really) and it is very important that those processes stay the same as time goes by. In order to guarantee a level of quality to your end-users or customers, you must have processes where every input that goes through passes through the same steps.