For many small teams, IT Service Management (ITSM) might sound like it’s reserved for large enterprises with huge IT departments and complex infrastructures.
However, ITSM isn’t just for huge businesses. It’s a structured approach that can help much smaller teams improve service delivery, reduce inefficiencies, and create a more seamless IT experience.
The challenge for smaller teams is adopting ITSM in a way that doesn’t require excessive resources or overly complex processes. However, with the right software at your disposal, ITSM can be lightweight, flexible, and tailored to fit the unique needs of your business.
In this guide, you’ll learn about the essentials of ITSM for smaller teams, covering key processes to prioritise, how to choose the right tools, and how Starhive’s adaptable platform makes ITSM accessible — no matter the size of your team.
Why small teams should care about ITSM
Even in a small business, IT issues can quickly become disruptive. IT teams often find themselves firefighting instead of working proactively without a clear system for managing service requests, tracking IT assets, or resolving incidents.
A simple ITSM approach helps to:
- Improve efficiency: Organise IT tasks and service requests in one place, preventing bottlenecks.
- Enhance user experience: Employees get the support they need faster, reducing downtime.
- Provide structure: Even a basic ITSM framework ensures consistency in handling issues.
- Support scalability: As the business grows, ITSM ensures processes don’t break under increasing demand.
The key for small teams is to start with the essentials. This means adopting only the processes that provide immediate value rather than implementing a full-scale ITSM framework overnight.
Before you start, we recommend thinking about where your IT team is struggling today. For example:
- IT is struggling to keep track of what they need to do and who they need to do it for: Start with request management and simple ticketing.
- Services and systems keep going down and fixing them is taking far longer than expected: Start with incident management.
- Things keep getting broken after changes are made: Start with a basic change management process.
Core ITSM processes to prioritise
Small teams don’t need to adopt every ITSM process at once. Instead, they should focus on a few key areas that will have the greatest impact.
1. Incident management: Resolving IT issues quickly
Incident management is all about ensuring IT issues are addressed promptly. When a key business service stops working as expected, the Wi-Fi goes down, or employees are getting locked out of systems en masse, n, there needs to be a process for reporting and resolving these incidents efficiently.
How to get started:
- Set up a central place for reporting IT incidents (a ticketing system or even a simple email alias).
- Define response times based on urgency.
- Track resolutions to help solve recurring incidents and to help indicate where there might be an underlying problem to solve to provide a long term solution.
2. Request Management: Handling employee IT needs
Beyond fixing problems, IT teams also handle service requests, such as basic technical support, provisioning access to systems, or configuring new devices.
How to get started:
- Set up a ticketing system connected to either a request portal or an email inbox.
- Automate common approvals (like standard software requests, for instance).
- Keep a record of past requests to improve response times.
- If you have the time and budget, set up a self-service portal where employees can get answers to their questions independently (see knowledge management section).
3. Asset management: Keeping track of IT resources
Even small teams have IT assets to manage. This includes laptops, software licenses, network equipment, and more. You risk overspending on unnecessary purchases or struggling with compliance without appropriate tracking.
How to get started:
- Maintain an up-to-date inventory of IT assets. This often starts in spreadsheets but we highly recommend moving to a dedicated asset database to better track the history of your inventory.
- Assign ownership of devices to specific employees.
- Implement an asset lifecycle process.
- Track warranty and renewal dates to avoid unexpected costs.
Explore IT asset management with Starhive
4. Knowledge management: Reducing repetitive IT requests
By documenting common solutions and best practices to requests and incidents, small teams can reduce the time spent answering the same questions or fixing the same issues repeatedly.
How to get started:
- Create a simple knowledge base with solutions to common IT issues. This can start internally but specific articles should be made available to the entire organisation so people can self-serve for certain topics.
- Encourage employees to check the knowledge base before submitting a request.
- Regularly update documentation as new issues arise.
5. Change management: Stop breaking things
One of the benefits of being a smaller company is being able to move fast. But moving fast does not need to come at the cost of breaking your services after changes. With a simple change management process in place, you can reduce the risk of making changes and provide a better experience to everyone interacting with your services.
How to get started:
- Create a simple change calendar or timeline so everyone can understand when changes are being made to help reduce risk of conflicts.
- Monitor the types of changes being made and start to group these changes into different categories based on the risk levels to business services.
- Implement a small change advisory board for the highest risk changes only.
- Iterate the process and your categories as time goes on.
Choosing the right ITSM tools for small teams
One of the biggest barriers to ITSM adoption is the perception that it requires expensive, enterprise-grade tools. Modern ITSM platforms (especially those with no-code capabilities where you can build your own portal or apps to help deliver your services) can make ITSM both cost-effective and easy to implement.
What to look for in a prospective ITSM tool
For small teams, the ideal ITSM tool should be:
- Flexible: Customisable to your team’s unique workflows.
- Strong emphasis on data: Can store any asset or data that supports the resolution of requests and incidents
- Focus on UX: Provides ways to build experiences that work for your colleagues and drives adoption of ITSM processes
- Scalable: Grows with your business and into new business areas like HR, legal, and finance without requiring a complete overhaul
- Cost-effective: Provides essential features without unnecessary complexity.
How Starhive makes ITSM simple for smaller teams
Many ITSM platforms are built for large organisations and have rigid structures that don’t suit the needs of small teams (and big teams for that matter).
For example, this may include lengthy vendor lock-in agreements that can restrict smaller teams who need to remain more agile and responsive to organisational change.
Many larger tools also have non-transparent pricing structures. In these structures, users pay for 100% of the functionality but may not use more than 20% of the tool's offerings.
Starhive, on the other hand, is designed with flexibility in mind, allowing smaller IT teams to:
- Start with template ITSM processes and then tailor them to match their specific workflows.
- Bring in any asset or other supporting data to provide the IT team with more context to close tickets
- Automate repetitive tasks, freeing up IT staff for more strategic work.
- Customise everything down to ticket types, ticket attributes, CMDB structure, or user interface.
- Understand their services, infrastructure, and assets in a more visually engaging way, using dependency mapping across data objects to support incident resolution and change management.
- Pay for utilisation and data stored, not specific features. Meaning you don’t have to pay for a top tier just to get access to one key feature you need.
Explore how you can do more with Starhive here.
Getting started with ITSM
Adopting ITSM doesn’t need to be overwhelming. By starting with key processes and using a tool that aligns with your needs, even small teams can quickly see improvements in IT service delivery.
Next steps
Before you start, remember that the ITSM landscape is ever-changing, regardless of your team or organisation size.
That’s why Starhive recently teamed up with Scandio to produce the ITSM Trends Report for 2025, featuring key insights from the latest Gartner report. This expert-led eBook is the perfect way to prepare and build an effective strategy for your team, so why not make it your priority on your reading list today?
But in the meantime, let’s recap on the first things to consider when taking your first steps into ITSM:
- Identify your team’s biggest IT pain points.
- Start with a simple ITSM tool (like Starhive) that fits your workflow.
- Gradually introduce core ITSM processes without overcomplicating things.
- Automate where possible to reduce manual effort.
- Continuously refine your approach as your business grows.
Want to see how Starhive can help your team easily implement ITSM and streamline IT service delivery? Try it today.
