Article updated on 14/07/26
The cost of getting this wrong is significant. According to Gartner, I&O leaders overspent by $750 million on unused ITSM tool features — up from $600 million in 2019 — by failing to align tool selection with actual organizational readiness. (Gartner, “6 Smart Steps for ITSM Tool Selection Success,” Chris Matchett and Rich Doheny, November 2019, Refreshed March 2021.) Implementing the right practices in the right sequence is how you avoid becoming part of that statistic.
ITIL and ITSM Maturity: The Foundation Before the Best Practices
ITIL provides a foundational framework for ITSM best practices, but it does not cover everything. The practices below address gaps that ITIL leaves open — particularly in areas like self-service adoption, team structure, customer experience design, and tool governance.
ITIL is defined as:
“A set of best-practice publications for IT service management. ITIL gives guidance on the provision of quality IT services and the processes, functions and other capabilities needed to support them.“
ITIL describes processes, procedures, tasks, and checklists that are not specific to any singular organization or technology. These practices can be applied to knowledge management strategies and used with ITSM software. But ITIL is best understood as an architectural blueprint — the practices below are the full construction and operations manual.
ITIL adoption is also a progressive journey, not a one-time implementation. Most organizations begin with incident management and service request fulfillment before advancing to problem management, change management, and eventually service level management. Your current maturity level should determine which practices you prioritize first — a point we return to throughout this guide.
7 Best Practices for Service Management Success
In this article, “customers” refers to internal employees who submit IT support requests. “End users” and “employees” are used synonymously. “Agents” refers to IT service desk staff. If you are starting from scratch, begin with Best Practice 1 (maturity assessment) before investing in tooling or automation. Organizations with existing ITSM tools should prioritize Best Practices 3 and 4 to optimize what they already have.
The seven ITSM best practices for service management covered in this guide are: (1) Evaluate your ITSM maturity and define a strategy, (2) Automate the right tasks first and build self-service that users actually adopt, (3) Establish KPIs and metrics, (4) Make customer experience a measurable priority, (5) Utilize an IT service catalog, (6) Select an ITSM tool that matches your maturity level and growth trajectory, (7) Build an effective service management team.
Best Practice 1: Evaluate Your ITSM Maturity and Create a Clearly Defined Strategy Toward Business Goals
The most common error for service and support teams is misjudging their current ITSM maturity level. When teams set goals based on an inaccurate baseline, they build strategies they are not yet ready to execute. Because inaccurate maturity assessments lead to misaligned goals, the first best practice must be to evaluate maturity honestly and then recognize areas where your service management strategy is falling short.
Start with diagnostic questions: Are there enough agents to meet current demand? Do you have a service management tool in use? How are tickets being created? Do customers understand how to access information and submit tickets, or is processing taking too long once tickets are submitted? To structure this evaluation, consider using a recognized ITSM maturity model such as the HDI Support Center Maturity Model, the CMMI for Services framework, or the Axelos ITIL Maturity Model. Each provides a scoring methodology that maps your current capabilities to a defined maturity stage — giving you a defensible baseline rather than an educated guess.
Once you’ve defined your baseline maturity level and where you hope to scale, you can strategically align service and support offerings with business goals. This requires input from key stakeholders across the IT service desk, business leadership, and the customers you support. From there, build a plan with clear benchmarks and scheduled check-ins to adjust your strategy as maturity progresses.
Best Practice 2: Automate the Right Tasks First, and Build Self-Service That Users Actually Adopt
Automation is where ITSM ambition most often outpaces execution. The instinct to automate is right, but the sequencing is frequently wrong. Organizations that automate before they have clean, consistent process workflows don’t save time; they scale their inefficiencies. Before you automate anything, map the process manually. If you can’t describe the workflow clearly enough for a human to follow it every time, you’re not ready to automate it.
Start with the highest-volume, lowest-complexity tasks where the process is already well-defined: password resets, software provisioning, common service requests. These are the areas where automation delivers fast, measurable ROI and builds organizational confidence in the approach. From there, you can progressively extend automation to more complex workflows — and eventually layer in AI-driven capabilities like intelligent ticket routing and conversational self-service — once the underlying process foundation is solid enough to support them.
The shift-left initiative — the practice of resolving issues at the lowest possible support tier, through self-service at Level 0 (fully automated or knowledge-based resolution with no agent involvement) or first-contact resolution at Level 1 (resolved by a frontline agent without escalation), rather than escalating to specialist agents at Level 2 and above — is the organizing principle behind effective automation. When self-service works, agents are freed for higher-complexity work, customers get faster resolution, and the service desk moves closer to a value-center model.
Where AI fits in ITSM automation is a question more organizations are asking — and the honest answer is: it depends on your foundation. AI delivers the most value when applied to well-defined, data-rich processes. The highest-ROI AI use cases in service management today include intelligent ticket classification and routing, conversational self-service through AI-powered virtual agents, predictive incident detection, and automated resolution of common repeatable issues.
The risk comes when organizations deploy AI before their underlying data quality, knowledge base, and process workflows are mature enough to support it. AI amplifies what is already there — if your processes are inconsistent or your knowledge base is outdated, AI will surface those problems at scale. The right sequence is: stabilize processes, clean your data, then layer AI on top.
To start with automation, identify tasks that already have some degree of consistency and work from there, keeping in mind what customers and agents need most. Automation shouldn’t replace humans — it should positively augment their experience.
Best Practice 3: Establish Metrics and KPIs for Your Service Management Strategy and Automation
You will need to establish key performance indicators (KPIs) for the IT service management software and any self-service additions to help you refine your strategy and identify areas of improvement. To help understand your level of ITSM success and identify improvement opportunities consider some, or all, of the following six metrics as a means of better understanding performance:
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Level Zero Solvable (LZS): This is a measure that can be used to assess knowledge article strength (and suitability) prior to launching a self-service/self-help/self-care capability. But it also has an ongoing use as a success measure for self-service.
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Self-service usage: This needs to consider various dimensions. Firstly, there’s the absolute volume and then the percentage share of overall volumes. Secondly, there are different usage types to consider-knowledge access, support ticket creation, service requests, automated resolution/provisioning use, etc.
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Software success and failure levels: This can be both system-measured and ascertained via end-user feedback. For instance, the volume or percentage of knowledge searches that resulted in a ticket being raised.
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Costs: There’s the month-to-month cost per transaction trend (it will differ based on volumes) and in comparison with other support channel costs.
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Speed-related measures: Whether self-service is speeding up resolutions and provisioning, resulting in lower levels of lost productivity.
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Employee experience/satisfaction: Not only is the level of self-service performance against target and across time important, so is the relative level of satisfaction or happiness versus other access and communication channels.
Best Practice 4: Make Customer Experience a Measurable Priority, Not an Afterthought
Step 1: Shift from cost-center to value-center thinking. The role of the service desk is to create value for the customer and, in turn, the business as a whole. To do that, you must drive adoption of ITSM and self-service initiatives. The question is how to get customers to avoid shadow IT (unofficial tools and workarounds employees use when they bypass the sanctioned IT service desk) and potentially frustrating workarounds. The answer is by making customer experience a measurable priority and turning the service desk from a cost-center to a value-center.
Step 2: Map your customer personas and journeys. To become customer centric, you must know your customer fully and implement outside-in thinking — designing services from the customer’s perspective rather than the IT team’s internal view. Begin by identifying who your customers are and mapping out their journey. This means taking a thorough look at each type of customer and fully understanding their needs at each touchpoint. You can read more about how to identify different customer personas and map their journeys in this recent blog post.
Step 3: Coordinate agent experience to deliver consistency. There is no way to provide a consistent experience to every customer, every time, without a coordinated effort and an easy way for agents to execute it. This starts with the service management strategy — not with individual agent effort. Customer experience is a systems problem before it is a people problem.
Best Practice 5: Utilize an IT Service Catalog
Another service management best practice is to utilize an IT service catalog. The service catalog is one of the components in the Service Portfolio (the complete set of services managed by IT, including those in development, live, and retired) that is communicated publicly to employees.
To put it simply: The IT service catalog should be the go-to document to find IT services, hardware, software, and support. It is the vehicle for defining, prioritizing, and marketing IT services to individuals.
When you are creating your service management strategy, communication is at the core of success. Your service catalog tells your agents, customers, and managers what to expect, which can increase their adoption of ITSM and self-service solutions.
Best Practice 6: Select an ITSM Tool That Matches Your Maturity Level and Growth Trajectory
Choosing the right IT service management tool is one of the most consequential decisions in your ITSM journey. Your ITSM tool will be the foundation for all of your IT services — from ticket creation, tracking, and incident management, to linking incidents together to understand greater problems. I
t might seem overwhelming to consider changing ITSM tools, especially if you’ve had the same software for years, but ITSM tool selection doesn’t have to be complicated. The key is evaluating candidates against your current maturity level and your three-year operational roadmap, not just a feature checklist.
The main factors to consider when selecting an ITSM tool are:
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Total cost of ownership (TCO): This includes not just licensing costs but implementation, administration, training, and ongoing configuration costs. Many organizations underestimate TCO and end up paying for capabilities they never use — a pattern Gartner’s research on ITSM overspending documents directly.
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Maturity and scalability: The tool should support where you are today and where you plan to be in three years. A tool that fits a reactive, ticket-driven operation may not support the automation and self-service capabilities you’ll need as maturity increases.
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Ease of use and configuration: No-code or low-code workflow management is increasingly critical as IT teams face pressure to adapt processes quickly without relying on expensive professional services engagements.
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Native integration capabilities: The tool should connect cleanly with your existing monitoring, remote support, and operations management infrastructure — not require custom development to bridge every gap.
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Out-of-the-box process support: Evaluate the depth of support for the ITIL disciplines you need most, including incident management, change management, and service request fulfillment.
You can read more about these factors in Gartner’s 6 Smart Steps for ITSM Tool Selection Success.(Gartner, “6 Smart Steps for ITSM Tool Selection Success,” Chris Matchett and Rich Doheny, November 2019, Refreshed March 2021.)
Best Practice 7: Create an Effective Service Management Team
Next to selecting the right ITSM tool, building an effective service management team is one of the most operationally impactful decisions you’ll make. Assemble your team before implementing any major service management changes or updates — the team structure should inform the strategy, not be retrofitted to it afterward.
When assembling your team, think about work styles. Does your team work best in an agile environment, or a more traditional structured approach? It’s likely that you won’t be starting from scratch, which is an advantage. Understand who excels in which style of environment and learn each team member’s strengths. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace research, employees who feel engaged and work in roles aligned to their strengths produce measurably better business outcomes — a finding that applies directly to service desk performance and customer satisfaction scores.
Beyond work styles, effective team design requires visibility into capacity. Use your ITSM data — ticket volume trends, resolution times, escalation rates — to assess whether current staffing levels match service demand. Where gaps exist, automation can offset capacity constraints without requiring immediate headcount increases. The goal is a team that is structured for the work it actually needs to do, not the work it did two years ago.
Take the Next Step with ITSM Best Practices for Service Management
Effective ITSM begins with an honest maturity assessment, followed by targeted automation and clear KPIs. A customer-first mindset, a well-maintained service catalog, the right tooling, and a team structured for success complete the picture. Together, these seven practices provide a framework for service management that scales with your organization — from reactive ticket handling to proactive, value-driven operations. Organizations that implement these practices in sequence, rather than in isolation, consistently see faster resolution times, higher self-service adoption, and a service desk that contributes measurably to business outcomes rather than simply absorbing cost.
To learn more about how EasyVista can help you meet your service management goals, you can read about EV Service Manager here.
1 Gartner, “6 Smart Steps for ITSM Tool Selection Success,” Chris Matchett and Rich Doheny, November 2019, Refreshed March 2021
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