From the Desk of John Snyder, Net Friends CEO:
I am proud to announce that as of April 2022, all eight individuals on Net Friends’ Leadership Team achieved their certification in IT Service Management. We made the decision at the start of this year to study and pass our ITIL exam as a team.
Our main motivation was to ensure that our leaders worked from a shared framework on service management best practices. The lessons we learned and the ideas generated from this certification experience have significantly increased our capabilities to deliver exceptional customer service.
Years from now, I am confident that we’re going to look back at this decision as a key foundation to our continued success. By focusing on a common set of guiding principles, we are leading Net Friends to optimally manage risk, create value, and increase productivity.
Our Leadership Team recognized that the complexity of modern IT environments require trained professionals to deliver consistent results. After exploring a few options (Six Sigma, COBIT, ISO 20000), we zeroed in on the IT Information Library framework, or ITIL. Our history with ITIL contributed to this unanimous commitment, since we observed how two Net Friends technicians gained outstanding value and insights from enrolling in ITIL courses back in 2013. Additionally, a significant update to the ITIL framework came out in 2019 that modernized the concepts to include more considerations to supply chain management, Software as a Service (SaaS), and Agile project management concepts – all of which delivered significant benefits to us as we also learned more modern management strategies.
The major determining factor that sealed our commitment to ITIL was our adoption of a new Professional Services Automation (PSA) platform that is constructed around its principles. The baseline configuration and system in our PSA tool were all based on ITIL terms, methods, and concepts. We determined that by learning ITIL together, we could more fully harness our PSA tool and more effectively implement it throughout the company.
When we began studying together, our Leadership Team worked from the same training materials and participated in multiple discussion sessions. The insights that were unlocked from the first sessions were so impactful and invigorating, we all made room on our schedules for additional discussions. While we all gained knowledge about optimizing service management, we were also learning more about how our leadership peers were approaching their role and decisions. We bonded and grew as a team through this process.
For our customers, this focus on becoming certified in IT Service Management manifests value in so many ways. For one, their support requests and technology needs are now optimally handled by both a well-integrated system and an effective team leveraging that system. Our customers benefit from the Leadership Team being challenged and inspired by the emphasis in ITIL to create value for our customers. This is a well-aligned commitment that we readily embraced. We were given tools and ideas by our training to deliver positive outcomes and help our customers thrive. This training helped us unlock a high-level view of the entire service value chain (see below) and facilitates our strategy to generate value throughout. I look forward to highlighting and reporting on more ITIL-inspired actions and positive decisions in the months and years ahead.
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