• The power of FreeTextFields as known from the OTRS ticket engine was implemented in the change management and allows you to define additional attributes for changes and even work orders!
• Performance of the change management module was increased dramatically by implementing state of the art caching technologies. Therefore the interaction with the system is seamless to an installation you run on your local machine!
• When creating templates for changes and / or work orders to give your users standardized and easy to use templates for common / reoccurring changes you have the change to reset change and work order states!
• A new change number generator was implemented for all of you who do not like the regular change number generator
• Improved detail view of changes: we added the work order title to the change overview for a more intuitive interaction with the system

In summary it’s worth taking part in the beta testing of OTRS::ITSM 2.1! We need your feedback to make the product even better!

((enjoy))

The first version of the App provides you with instant access to one or more OTRS instances as you already know from the iPhone Mail app when having multiple mailboxes configured.

In details the OTRS iPhone App provides the following capabilities:

• Escalation View – a quick overview of tickets that are to be escalated
• My Tickets – a list of tickets assigned to your account
• Watched Tickets – all tickets you are following
• New Ticket – create a new request and assign it to a team / queue
• Comment on Tickets – add new articles / comments to existing tickets
• Reply on Tickets – Reply to requests via the app and OTRS will send the reply to the requester

ITIL v3 provides you with different ideas where to tie in your CSI initiative:

• Service Approach
• Functional Group Approach
• Lifecycle Approach

Based on my experience it hardly can’t stated what the best approach is because this depends on your unique service organization. Whatever what approach you adept, make sure you do not miss the most important players to measure and feed back on your service quality and its maturity: your customer. Their feedback  - combined with other reporting / monitoring results –  makes it easy to create a “sense of awareness” which is the most important factor in order to successfully improve your services. Only if you draw a worst case scenario that describes what will happen if you leave your service offering unchanged, you might get the attention you need to drive your initiative.

While creating that scenario you will certainly find out who’s supporting you, who’s sceptic and who’s trying to prevent the oncoming change. Use this alliance to achieve your goal easier and with less pain!

This team needs to be feed and inspired with a vision of how the future service offering may look like and all of a sudden you’ll find yourself in the challenge of becoming a communication specialist. During that phase it is crucial that your vision is realistic and does not cause more changes than absolutely necessary! Remember: CSI is a persistent process – the wheel keeps turning!

If you have defined the vision and aligned your team you need to empower additional resources of the affected departments / teams in order to realize the defined changes. Never try to enforce the changes on your own, empowering coworkers of the departments where the change needs to take place is the smarter way!

Proof the benefit – further on you’ll have to act as the motivator: make the benefit of the change visible to the organization, quick wins is your friend!
By taking these small steps you will – sooner or later – achieve your final goal: all changes are implemented, the services are improved and transferred into production. A regular projected would be finished at that point but as we’re talking about continual service improvement it’s about to initiate the next round !

((enjoy))