Businesses and employees alike have faced a challenging few months of figuring out what remote working means for them while others have gone through complete digital transformations to properly adjust. Now, two months down the line, we’re past the initial shock of having to make this difficult shift almost overnight and IT teams are facing their next hurdle.

Organisations are looking cautiously towards reopening their offices and getting back to normality – a new normal – but IT teams must ensure that productivity doesn’t flag as some form of remote or distributed working looks set to continue for the foreseeable future. This can be facilitated by following IT Service Management (ITSM) best practices and adopting automation processes within the service desk.

Best practice makes perfect sense with ITSM processes

Traditional IT support processes can prove ineffective when an entire workforce is remote as IT must battle routine and novel requests at once, which can overstretch its capabilities while managing services. To effectively meet these unforeseen demands, businesses need to rely on their ITSM tools performing at its best.

In the remote jobs era, ITSM best practice means making a comprehensive and clear service catalogue available – as what IT teams can offer may have changed due to the shift to WFH – as well as communicating with users promptly and effectively about any altered or unavailable services or system failures. Ensuring these lines of communication are clear and open for remote teams is crucial to upholding productivity as the way employees work continues to evolve.

Automation has the answer

The immense pressure IT service desk teams have experienced over the past few months can be mitigated by employing automation technologies. When leveraged within service management processes, automation can help end-users resolve service requests independently, without requiring input from a service desk analyst.

Shifting left and moving IT resolutions closer to the end-user will minimise incident escalation and take away some of the workload IT teams are facing. With effective noise reduction, IT pros can spend more time on the tasks that really require their attention rather than simple requests, like password rests. When raising a ticket, the application of automation means users can be taken through a step-by-step incident management process that will allow them to diagnose and resolve certain issues autonomously, stopping simple requests entering the ticket queue.

As well as reducing the workload IT teams are facing and allowing them to use their time more productively, automation is a crucial tool for the wider workforce during this challenging time. Every employee is facing different circumstances at home, so it has never been more important for IT support to be available 24/7 – this is where automation and self-service can prove invaluable to improve problem management.

While businesses and their employees face renewed uncertainty as returning to work looms, it’s vital to uphold employee productivity. To cope with the challenge of remote IT support, companies should focus on keeping their house in order with ITSM framework and employing additional tools, such as automation, to reduce the pressure on IT pros by allowing remote workers to self-serve where possible.

Learn more about Ivanti Service Manager and Ivanti Automation.