How Creativity Drives Customer Service in IT
Ep. 42: The Method, the Playbook, and the War Room: How Creativity Drives Customer Service in IT
In this episode of Outside-IN, we are talking with Ted Korba, Senior Director of IT Services, about how IT Service Management (ITSM)—including problem, change, and incident management—serves as a necessary "playbook" to bring "a method to the madness" in today’s chaotic, technology-heavy corporate world.
Ted reveals how he is transforming the rigid IT processes into efficient systems, such as mitigating risk through modern change control that utilizes tools like Jira and Slack for chat-based Change Advisory Board (CAB) meetings instead of mandatory sit-downs, making the process "more conducive to everyday work". A core innovation discussed is the "war room" chat, where the team "swarms" major incidents, allowing engineers (the "smart people") to focus solely on fixing the problem while an incident manager handles proactive, standardized communication to the user base via tools like Atlassian Status Page. Crucially, the episode stresses the importance of shifting IT culture from the introverted "techie in the basement" stereotype to a customer-centric service industry that views helping people as a privilege, thereby building user confidence and trust by ensuring the uptime and reliability needed by the company.
Get ready to gain insight into leveraging creativity and collaboration to stick to their guns and successfully implement ITSM policies that benefit the entire organization.
Episode Highlights
Connect with: Ted Korba | LinkedIn
Learn More about: Integrated Facilities Management | IST Data Security
Key Takeaways:
- ITSM (IT Service Management) provides essential structure and stability, acting as a "playbook" for IT operations. ITSM processes, which include problem management, change management, and incident management, bring "a method to the madness" to the chaotic corporate world and are critical for saving time and money, being more efficient, ensuring faster service reliability, and maintaining security and compliance.
- Change Management must be modernized and flexible to mitigate risk without hindering innovation. To avoid slowing down the team, the IT department implemented small innovations, such as using Jira Service Management and holding Change Advisory Board (CAB) meetings in a chat-based format (using Microsoft Teams or Slack) rather than forcing mandatory in-person meetings. The process uses different change types (Emergency, Urgent, Standard, and Normal) to ensure people "think before they make a change" while allowing low-risk changes to proceed immediately.
- A "War Room" approach is essential for collaborative and creative incident response. When a major incident or outage occurs, the IT support and infrastructure teams are trained to immediately alert a "war room" chat (in Microsoft Teams), where the team is expected to "swarm it". This collaboration promotes creative thinking and brainstorming to solve complex problems faster.
- Effective incident communication relies on standardized processes and tools to free up engineers. During an incident, an incident manager is assigned whose primary job is to handle proactive, standardized communication to the user base using tools like Atlassian Status Page. This process ensures the "smart people" (the engineers and administrators) are not distracted by fielding communication, allowing them to focus entirely on fixing the problem.
- IT culture must shift to be customer-centric and transparent to build user trust. The sources emphasize the need to combat the stereotype of the introverted IT "techie in the basement" by pushing staff out of their comfort zone and promoting IT as a customer-centric service-oriented industry that sees helping people as a privilege. By successfully following ITSM processes, the IT department avoids giving users "post-traumatic stress syndrome" related to changes, thereby building confidence and trust with the user base.
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