We often meet IT service management stakeholders who stick to what they know. This could be platform people, service management architects, service delivery people, etc. They are convinced that the way they currently work is the best way to do things. Examples of this can be how their current tool is designed such as screen layout, menus, colors but also deeper things such as work processes etc. Arguments like, this is how we usually do it, it works best in our company, are often the arguments we hear.

Our counter question could be: ok, I understand that you like your current design and screen layout, but if we can prove to you that your productivity will increase significantly and your employee satisfaction with IT services will increase if you change the way you work , could that change your mind? You'd be surprised how often IT stakeholders are unwilling to change their minds, even with compelling results such as increased productivity and improvements in customer satisfaction as a result.

However, interface design and processes are not the only thing that affects productivity. One factor that we often see being underestimated is the sheer performance of your Service Management System. It might sound like a small thing, but if you can bring the average response time from seconds to under a second, it means something. Consider a service desk agent who works many hours in the system every day, performing hundreds of reads and writes to resolve requests and incidents. If by pure performance improvements you can affect productivity and user satisfaction, it matters.

It is not uncommon that we see that the combination of a cleaner design in the user interface combined with better system performance can give close to half an hour of extra time back per working day per service desk agent. How many agents do you have 25, 100 or 1000? The math is simple and very compelling.