Everything you wanted to know about ITSM — and us.

The ITSM People is the UK's leading independent IT Service Management consultancy, founded in 2014. We specialise in ITSM maturity assessments, transformational consulting and ITIL 4 adoption for enterprise IT organisations. We are entirely independent — no vendor partnerships, no tool affiliations, no managed service relationships. We have worked with some of the UK's most complex and regulated organisations across financial services, national infrastructure, construction and professional services.

We are UK-based and operate primarily across the United Kingdom. Our consultants have experience working internationally and we do take on engagements outside the UK where the fit is right, but the majority of our client work is with UK-headquartered enterprise organisations.

The ITSM People was founded in 2014. We have been operating as an independent ITSM consultancy for over 12 years, which means we have seen multiple waves of change in the industry — from the shift to ITIL 4, through DevOps and agile adoption, to the current focus on AI readiness. That perspective is genuinely useful when advising organisations on where to invest.

We use the word 'leading' carefully. It reflects three things. First, longevity — we have been operating as a pure-play independent ITSM consultancy since 2014, which gives us a depth of benchmarking data and client experience that newer entrants simply cannot match. Second, client quality — our track record includes some of the UK's most complex and regulated organisations across financial services, national infrastructure and professional services. These organisations do not engage consultants lightly. Third, practitioner credibility — our Director of Consulting, David Barrow, holds ITIL Master status (held by fewer than 400 people globally), is a published author on service management, and sits on the BSI ISO 20000 committee. The 'independent' part is equally deliberate. We hold no tool vendor partnerships, no managed service contracts and no software reselling arrangements. That independence is increasingly rare in the ITSM consulting market and it matters enormously to the quality of advice we give.

A few things genuinely set us apart. We are pure-play ITSM — it is all we do. We do not have a managed services division pulling us toward recommending outsourcing, a software arm incentivising us to recommend particular tools, or a vast generalist practice where ITSM is a small department. ITSM is the whole business, which means the depth and focus of our knowledge is different. Our team brings genuine breadth too — from frontline service desk transformation through to board-level operating model advisory — and that range is led by David Barrow, whose personal reputation and credentials in the ITSM community are recognised independently of The ITSM People brand. We are also emphatically not the Big 4. Large consulting firms bring large teams, large overheads and large day rates — and the person who sold you the engagement is rarely the person doing the work. With us, you get senior practitioners doing the actual work, at a price point that reflects the fact that we do not carry that overhead. Our day rate is fixed and transparent. No bait and switch, no junior consultants once the contract is signed. We are happy to discuss pricing directly.

ITSM (IT Service Management) is the broader discipline — the practice of designing, delivering, managing and improving IT services to meet business needs. ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) is a framework of best practice guidance that organisations use to implement and improve their ITSM. Think of ITSM as the 'what' and ITIL as one of several 'hows'. ITIL is the most widely adopted ITSM framework globally, but it is not the only one — COBIT, ISO 20000 and SIAM are others.

ITIL v3 (published 2007, updated 2011) organised IT service management around a service lifecycle of five stages: Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation and Continual Service Improvement. ITIL 4 (published 2019) replaced this with a more flexible model built around a Service Value System and 34 management practices. ITIL 4 places greater emphasis on agility, DevOps integration, customer value and continual improvement as a cultural behaviour rather than a lifecycle stage. Most organisations still operate using ITIL v3 concepts in practice, even if they have formally adopted ITIL 4. The transition from v3 to ITIL 4 is less about relearning everything and more about broadening the lens through which you think about service value.

Tool agnostic means we have no commercial relationships, partnerships or financial incentives tied to any ITSM tool vendor. We do not resell licences, take referral fees or hold partner status with ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, Freshservice, BMC or any other platform. This means our advice on tool selection, implementation or optimisation is based entirely on what is right for your organisation — not on what earns us a commission. In an industry where most consultancies have tool partnerships, genuine independence is rarer than it should be. It is one of the defining characteristics of The ITSM People.

ITSM maturity describes how consistently, effectively and continuously an organisation manages its IT services. A low-maturity organisation relies on individual heroics and tribal knowledge — things get done, but inconsistently and often reactively. A high-maturity organisation has well-defined, consistently followed processes, uses data to drive decisions, and continuously improves. Maturity is typically measured across the key ITSM practice areas — incident management, change enablement, problem management, knowledge management, service catalogue and more — and scored against a benchmark framework.

Our ITSM benchmarking assessment covers all 34 ITIL 4 practice areas. It involves structured interviews with IT leadership and frontline teams, review of existing documentation and process evidence, and independent scoring against a consistent maturity benchmark. The output is a detailed report showing your maturity level across every practice area, the root causes of the gaps identified, and a prioritised improvement roadmap. A typical assessment takes four to six weeks from kick-off to final report delivery.

Three things distinguish our assessments. First, we are completely independent — no tool vendor relationships means no hidden agenda in our findings. Second, we benchmark against real data from comparable organisations, so your scores are contextualised against industry peers rather than an abstract ideal. Third, our consultants have actually run IT service organisations, not just advised them — which means our recommendations are grounded in operational reality rather than framework theory.

You receive a detailed written report covering your maturity score across all assessed practice areas, root cause analysis for the gaps identified, and a prioritised improvement roadmap with clear, actionable recommendations. We also deliver a formal readout session with your leadership team, walking through the findings and ensuring the roadmap is understood and owned. The report is designed to be a working document, not something that sits in a drawer.

Yes. AI readiness in the context of ITSM is one of our current areas of focus. Organisations investing in AI-powered service desks, predictive analytics and automation are finding that AI performance depends entirely on the quality of the ITSM foundations beneath it — clean data, consistent processes, maintained knowledge bases, complete service catalogues. We help IT leaders assess whether those foundations are in good enough shape to support AI adoption, and fix the gaps where they are not. You can also take our free AI Readiness Scorecard on this website for an initial directional view.

An assessment gives you an independent, evidence-based picture of where your ITSM stands today — what is working, what is not, and what to prioritise. A transformation engagement goes further: we work alongside your team to implement the improvements identified, embed new practices, and drive measurable change. Many clients start with an assessment and then engage us for transformation work. Others come to us with a specific transformation challenge already identified and do not need a full assessment first.

We work primarily with mid-to-large enterprise organisations, typically with IT teams of 50 or more people. We are comfortable operating at board level and frontline simultaneously, which matters in complex organisations where ITSM improvement requires both strategic alignment and operational change. Our clients include regulated financial institutions, national infrastructure operators, major construction firms and professional services organisations.

We work across all major ITSM platforms including ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, Freshservice, BMC Helix, TOPdesk and others. Because we hold no tool partnerships, we are equally at home on any platform and our process and practice advice is never shaped by which tool a client happens to be using. If a client needs tool selection advice, we give it objectively — based on their specific requirements, not on commercial relationships.

We charge a single, transparent day rate regardless of the route to market or the type of engagement. We do not have tiered pricing or junior consultant rates. Engagements are scoped clearly upfront with a fixed number of consulting days, so clients always know exactly what they are committing to before work begins. We work on outcome-based contracts outside IR35, which means our incentives are aligned with your results. We are happy to discuss our pricing directly.

Our consulting team holds the full range of ITIL qualifications up to and including ITIL Master — the highest qualification available, held by fewer than 400 people globally. Our Director of Consulting, David Barrow, is an ITIL Master, a published author on service management and sits on the BSI ISO 20000 committee — the international standard for IT service management. Our consultants have not just studied these frameworks; they have applied them in complex enterprise environments over many years.

Yes. We run a completely free one-to-one ITSM mentoring programme for IT professionals looking to develop their service management career. Mentoring is provided by senior practitioners with real-world experience. There is no catch and no obligation — it is something we do because developing the next generation of ITSM professionals matters to us. Applications are open via our website at itsmpeople.co.uk/mentoring.

Some common signs that independent ITSM support would help: the same incidents keep recurring without resolution; IT changes regularly cause unplanned outages; your service desk is overwhelmed and resolution times are poor; you are planning a significant tool investment but are not sure your processes are ready; leadership have lost confidence in IT's ability to deliver; or you are about to invest in AI and want to know whether your foundations will support it. If any of those feel familiar, a conversation costs nothing — our free strategy call is a good starting point.