How do I move from IT support into a people and process role in service management?

If you have spent a few years in IT support and find you enjoy untangling processes and helping people more than the deep technical work, service management has a range of roles built for exactly that. Service desk manager, process manager or owner, service delivery manager and enterprise service management roles all reward the ability to work out who owns what and get people to adopt a better way of working, and you can move towards them from the job you already have.

The question comes up often: someone a few years into support who most enjoys fixing messy processes and explaining things to users. In one recent community discussion, most replies pointed the same way, towards service desk management and ITIL style process work.

Why your support experience counts

Support is not something you need to leave behind. John Sansbury, in The Journey to Service Excellence, describes the support centre as the "eyes and ears" of the enterprise, and makes the point directly: "The fact is that the experience of frontline staff can be hugely beneficial when they take on a back-office role specifically because of their understanding of the consumer experience."

John's own route is encouraging too. He writes that careers used to be built on team management, budgetary responsibility or technical ability, and then: "Even by the age of thirty, I had none of these, nor a university degree, so I wasn’t at all sure how I would progress my career, until I discovered the world of service management."

Roles that suit people and process strengths

• Service desk or support centre manager: leads the team, the queue, the knowledge base and the relationship with the rest of the business.
• Process manager: runs a process such as incident, request or change day to day, trains people, measures it and removes barriers.
• Process owner: accountable for one process across the organisation and for its policy. John notes that the ability to ‘influence without authority’ is a particularly relevant skill, because the people doing the work usually report to someone else.
• Service delivery or service level manager: owns customer relationships, service reviews and the improvement plan.
• ITSM platform administrator or process analyst: workflow and configuration rather than networks.
• Enterprise service management roles in HR, facilities or finance, where teams are adopting request handling, knowledge and service catalogues and need people who have seen those practices work in IT.

Practical steps

1. Name the work you enjoy in concrete terms. "I like people" is hard to hire for. "I mapped a broken onboarding process, agreed an owner for each step and cut the chasing" is a job description.
2. Turn past work into evidence. For each thing you built or fixed, write down the problem, what you changed and what improved. If you measured something, use the number. If you did not, describe the change honestly rather than inventing a figure.
3. Ask for a small, named piece of process work in your current role. Offer to own the knowledge base, run a review of a recurring problem, improve new starter set up, or sort out a request type that keeps bouncing between teams.
4. Map the roles you want to skills, not titles. The Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) describes skills and levels of responsibility in plain terms. John has used it with clients to define roles and build career progression frameworks, and it will show you where your gaps really are.
5. Add one qualification that matches the role, after the evidence. ITIL Foundation is widely recognised for service management roles and can be studied part time alongside work. Our earlier article on which certificate to take after Foundation covers the next step.

A short worked example

This is an illustration, not a real case. An analyst in desktop support notices that new starters often arrive without accounts or equipment ready. She offers to own the process for a quarter. She maps the steps with HR and facilities, agrees one owner for each, and writes a checklist and a knowledge article. After three months she can show how many starters had everything working on day one, before and after. That is a strong story for a service desk team leader or process manager interview. It is also an enterprise service management story, because it crosses HR, facilities and IT.

Common mistakes

• Assuming you must be the most technical person in the room to lead. Many good service managers are not. What matters is respecting technical judgement and leaving technical calls to the people who know.
• Collecting certificates instead of evidence. A qualification opens the door; the story of something you improved gets you the job.
• Stepping away from the frontline too completely. John warns about an intermediate role meant as a Senior Analyst that was titled Team Leader, after which the people in it stopped answering calls and service got worse. Keep your feet in the work you are improving.

Your next step

On ESM's Exchange, our articles on the profile of a strong process owner and the process manager's operational role set out what those roles involve, and which certificate to take after ITIL Foundation covers qualifications.

For more on process roles, the support centre and career progression, read John Sansbury's The Journey to Service Excellence, available to members of ESM's Exchange.

Tags: esm-questions, career, service-desk-management, process-owner, itil

Sources

• https://www.peoplecert.org/help-and-support/faq-itil

• https://sfia-online.org/en

• https://community.spiceworks.com/t/after-6-years-in-tech-support-im-considering-whats-next-if-im-not-sure-i-want-to-specialize-and-it-isnt-clicking/1259580