What is 'Shift-Left' strategy in IT Service Management? Tips and Success Drivers below

IT service desk organisations are being challenged to move faster, be more agile and to better align with changing business user expectations and demographics. At the same time, there is a continual quest to improve operational efficiency, ensure service quality, decrease DSAT and manage compliance. 

This is quite a task! Where does the Service Desk even begin?

There are several approaches the Service Desk can employ, including adopting leaner processes, automating common SR Tasks and enabling more self-service. A common theme among all these are approaches relates to the idea of 'shifting left'

What Does It Mean to “Shift Left?”

In the context of service management, shift left can be summarised as, where possible and appropriate, moving problem resolution and other activities as close as possible to the end user. By shifting left, these activities are moved to lower cost delivery channels, which optimizes costs and enables more expensive resources (L3/L4) to focus on work that can’t be performed by L1/L2 analysts. In practice, here’s how it works: Introducing self-service (if it doesn’t already exist) enables a subset of tasks currently provided by level 1 support to be performed by end users themselves via a self-service portal (level 0). Likewise, a subset of level 2 activities can be moved to level 1, level 3 activities moved to level 2, and so on.

The Key Elements for Shift-Left Success

Shift-left success is reliant on 3 key capabilities:

1. IT self-service. A fit-for-purpose self-service capability is the key customer-engagement mechanism for delivering shift-left benefits. It will struggle to deliver these without fit-for-purpose knowledge management and automation capabilities though.
2. Knowledge management. The availability of fit-for-purpose knowledge articles and FAQs is a key factor for winning with IT self-service and thus Level 0 support.
3. Automation. This is key in delivering the benefits related to both increased speed of resolution/provisioning and cost reduction. Plus, a better customer experience.

So, a shift-left strategy is great, everyone wins. Or everyone should win – because there are, however, a number of barriers to cross for real shift-left success.

Common Shift-Left Enablement Barriers

• Not integrating knowledge sharing with business-as-usual (BAU) activities.
• Failing to change performance measures to reflect the new way of working.
• Not recognizing that the value of knowledge sharing comes from knowledge use, not knowledge capture and storage.

5 Shift-Left Success Drivers

1. Investing in fit-for-purpose organisational change management, not only to engender the required people change but also to review how individual and team performance is assessed, recognised, and rewarded.

2. Making knowledge management a BAU activity that’s embedded within day-to-day operations.

3. Aiming for knowledge exploitation over knowledge capture and storage – wherever possible leveraging proven knowledge management methodologies and techniques such as Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS) and Level Zero Solvable (LZS).

4. Focusing on employee wants and needs, not the available technology features.

5. Matching consumer-world capabilities in terms of ease-of-use and what can be achieved.

ITIL? glossary and abbreviations, 2011 Credits: Chuck Darst, Cherwell.com & joetheitguy.com