DEVELOP A SELF SERVICE SUPPORT PORTAL THAT DISPLAYS ALL BUSINESS-CRITICAL SERVICES.

Regardless if support requests are assigned to IT, finance, legal or HR, employees should be confident the right agent is handling their issue. Since employees do not know the full technical scope of their available services, they need an interface that translates their technical issues into ideas they can appreciate. So, what is the best way to display easy-to-understand business services in a one-stop-shop interface?

TWO WORDS: SERVICE CATALOG

The service catalog serves as two facets of a service operation:

• the operational piece of ITIL’s service portfolio
• the public-facing interface for employees to request services

A service catalog’s interface is built to educate an end-user on service delivery items such as service description, availability, SLAs and costs. In terms of user experience, a proper service catalog should serve as the singular nexus for all types of service requests available. All expectations should be described before a ticket submission to limit confusion.

The user interface of the service catalog focuses on displaying data related to service delivery, while the internal facing documentation provides context on strategy. Additional details are maintained such as target availability, backup, service owner (funding), service representative (business representative), criticality, OLAs and expiry criteria. This data can be used to assess whether a service should exist on the catalog.

1. When designing the catalog, the following questions may be considered:
2. What business need does this service address?
3. Who will pay for these services?
4. What are the risks and impact of service outages?
5. How should we prioritize our work?
6. Do we have enough resources to meet the incoming demand?

Answering these questions helps determine strategy in managing workflows to fulfill all the available services.

BUSINESS OBJECTIVES DRIVES IT SERVICE STRATEGY

Before we can discuss the technical requirements of a service catalog, we must investigate the quality criteria for which items are included in the service catalog. It’s key to take into account overarching business objectives such as revenue generation, customer impact and marketplace visibility that drive business processes.

Business services should be designed to maintain critical processes with special consideration on availability and demand. Internal technical services are designed to address the variety of events and processes required to fullfill each business service. These services may include application services, application data and the technology and infrastructure to host this data.

DEFINE KPI AND BUILD IMPROVEMENT STRATEGIES

Designing a service catalog to meet the operational requirements of an organization today is only half of the battle. Businesses are dynamic, which requires service teams to constantly benchmark the performance of each service process.

KPIs should be indicated in the Service Design Package—the ITIL-prescribed document defining all aspects of an IT service—to review the continued quality of service. As quality diminishes, the service pipeline may introduce new services or process improvements to help meet your SLAs. Teams should retire CIs when a reduced service quality no longer leads to positive outcomes and document any stakeholders who may have adverse reactions to changes.

As the scope of IT services changes, the service catalog can serve well to mask the complex processes guided by ITIL.

DOES YOUR IT TEAM HAVE THE BEST PROJECT MANAGEMENT STRATEGY?

Forecasts show that cloud-based project management tools are expected to grow around 14% in the next four years, requiring IT software to adapt to new use cases. Organizations with mature ITSM strategies can leverage project management best practices to introduce new services. As teams adapt their service operations to meet increased demands, IT departments are pressured now more than ever to implement changes quickly without posing risks to their service levels.

WHAT IS PROJECT MANAGEMENT?

Project management allows teams to build upon ITIL principles by defining several necessary processes when introducing new services. While less defined than incident, problem and change management, project management frameworks (such as PMBOK) can fill in the gaps when implementing new IT services.

When utilizing project management, a project is generally defined as:

a set of planned operations required to fulfil a goal within a defined timeframe

Whether it be to develop software, design new business processes, or update IT infrastructure, project teams typically require individuals across a variety of expertise and geographic locations to come together to scope, plan, implement, monitor and close projects.

WHERE ITIL MEETS PROJECT MANAGEMENT

As we narrow our perspective to the ITSM space, we can find definitive connections between ITIL and project management best practices. ITIL actively questions if an IT team is utilizing their resources effectively. Fortunately, ITIL already has defined several key processes required to implement a successful project:

• Project Initiation: Define key decision-makers, human resources and deliverables, available budget, assessment resources to determine ROI, the risk and mitigation plan and the transitional triggers to move from one stage to another.
• Project Planning and Coordination: Align the project with an organization’s internal project management guidelines and compliance rules.
• Project Control: Monitor your total costs and resources such as human efforts and capital expenditures.
• Project Reporting and Communication: Implement methods to determine IT resource management, business unit demands, and proper scheduling while keeping stakeholders notified of project milestones.

The ITIL guidelines provide a good base when discussing project management best practices by covering areas such as resource management, ROI, communication with stakeholders and identifying transitions.

INCORPORATING PROJECT MANAGEMENT BEST PRACTICES

Project management can build upon ITIL objectives. This can be achieved by identifying the right additional processes to include, such as Project Integration Management, Quality Management, Project Procurement Management, and Stakeholder Management.

In order to understand these processes in context, let’s look at how PMBOK defines them:

• Project Integration Management builds upon resource management by identifying the processes and activities needed to coordinate project groups.
• Quality Management emphasizes the need to document quality policies, objectives and responsibilities to ensure that the project satisfies all the requirements for which the project was launched.
• Project Procurement Management identifies the policies necessary to purchase goods and services to complete the project within the deadline and budget.
• Stakeholder Management identifies all people within the organization affected by the project.

Project management can improve your ITIL practices if you know where to look. Make sure you’re not missing out on the improved effectiveness your team can achieve with these techniques.

SERVICE MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE ISN’T EXCLUSIVELY FOR IT.

With the standardization of many IT processes, there are many services that provide management solutions to match the needs of your IT teams. But there are other teams that provide key business support. What exactly is stopping them from using the same platform to improve their workflows?

There are many practical reasons for separating your support teams and siloing operations. Many options are great at separating data, but fail to address each teams’ specific needs and workflows. IT will naturally resolve requests differently from compliance or HR.

That being said, your support teams don’t have to be siloed. They will benefit from having a centralized area to coordinate, standardize and automate work. Multi-tenant platforms can provide specific benefits to your operations. Let’s look at a few of them.

1. CONSOLIDATED SERVICE REPORTING

Most teams run their own reports, but analyzing a single group does not provide full insight into the overall service output. Departments often work independently of each other, which results in non-standard reporting. This places a burden on your executives when trying to make decisions from unrelated data sources. Collaborative work between departments also often goes unreported. Interdepartmental tasks are mostly handled through email with no method to analyze data associated with each action. This prevents analysis of any standard workflows that involve multiple teams.

Multi-tenant platforms simplify reporting standards to better determine team and organization KPIs. CIOs can benefit from having both a high-level view over each department’s performance and the ability to dive deeper into individual metrics.

2. IMPROVED SERVICE MAINTENANCE

Integrations commonly play a large part in many effective service management platforms. They are often used to connect disparate systems in order to get deeper analytics and metrics around your service operations. An example would be a development team that uses Jira integrating with their service management tool to determine which changes lead to an influx of service tickets.

When managing multiple systems for various support teams, the effort of upkeep between all these integrations can become expensive and complicated. Multi-tenant solutions eliminate that risk by offering a single avenue with which to link your various assets together.

3. MORE COST-SAVINGS

Many service management platforms will charge on a user-by-user basis through licenses. You might think that more users on one system would drive up costs, but, in fact, individual license costs will often decrease. Multi-tenant platforms will often offer more flexible pricing around their licensing models, especially when overall user counts increase. Effectively blending together named and concurrent licenses to fit the needs of your business will also add to your overall cost-savings.

CONCLUSION

In closing, multi-tenant solutions have clear advantages over separate platforms by providing enhanced visibility over organizational performance, an ease of maintainability, and a lower operating cost. These platforms provide the building blocks to design a custom solution per team, while hosting all the data in the same area.

BETTER AUTOMATION TOOLS FOR ALL.

At Vivantio, we constantly interact with teams who have mature service strategies but are searching for better ways to notify stakeholders of their incoming tasks, automate standard processes and define KPIs to adequately benchmark team performance.

To combat common process slowdowns, we have designed the Vivantio visual workflow process tool to streamline tasks and approvals for your standard workflow processes. Let’s discuss how the tool functions and then offer a few examples of applicable processes.

WHAT IS THE VISUAL WORKFLOW TOOL?

Vivantio’s Visual Workflow Tool is a flowchart builder that contains conditional statements to determine the order that tasks are assigned to decision-makers in your workflow process. Your processes can adapt based on previous actions. Therefore, our tool is designed to enforce different workflows depending on task decisions. An example of a conditional workflow includes a product return process that triggers separate tasks depending on the return reason.

Let’s look at how the Visual Workflow Tool address various company operation workflows.

EMPLOYEE ONBOARDING WORKFLOW

A disorganized and incomplete employee onboarding workflow can put an organization at risk for non-compliance or improper preparation. As with all workflows, the on-boarding process requires input between different stakeholders, requiring seamless transitions between each workflow stage.

Vivantio’s Visual Workflow Tool ensures that notifications, approvals and forms are displayed at the correct time and filled out by the proper person, so time-consuming processes such as manual emails, phone calls, and document tracking are completely automated.

Conditional task assignment in onboarding workflows may be used to eliminate unnecessary steps if an employee is a re-hire versus a new hire. If the individual is a new hire, the workflow may assign a task to them to fill out an I9 form and HR may initiate a background check based on the information filled out by the new hire. A re-hire instead may bypass this process entirely and automatically assign a task to the hiring manager to send an offer letter and schedule the starting date. Accepting the offer letter may then trigger additional processes such as assigning tasks to IT for hardware and software allocation.

CHANGE MANAGEMENT WORKFLOW

A successful change management workflow requires capturing details on the affected systems, measuring the risks involved, and managing approvals throughout the process.

The challenge with managing changes is efficiently planning, testing, implementing and then analyzing your KPIs to determine if the change was successful. These processes must occur without impeding normal business operations, hence the benefit of automatic approvals and conditional triggers. Triggering separate workflow processes depending on whether a change is pre-approved, normal or an emergency can help place focus on changes that have a larger impact on the organization.

Pre-approved processes, such as a planned asset upgrade, may trigger a single change manager approval. This prevents operational slow down with a lengthy review process. Scheduled reporting on KPIs associated with the change can be delivered to the change manager to determine if the change is successful.

CAPITAL EXPENDITURE WORKFLOW

Teams with improper evaluation and tracking protocols to process capital expenditure requests are open to budget risks. With Vivantio’s Visual Workflow Tool, you can create appropriate workflows to ensure the correct departments have input on reviewing and processing these requests.

An example process involves an IT employee filling out a form online to request funding for a new help desk solution. An approval notification is then sent to the requester’s manager, which, when approved, sends a secondary approval request to the CFO if the project exceeds a defined price threshold. After the CFO approves the purchase, the project details are delivered to the purchasing department to place an order. The contract may then be managed within your assets database for automated notifications when nearing license renewal.

REPORTING WORKFLOW

While streamlining workflows can rapidly improve a team’s output and success, a powerful reporting tool is essential for tracking service trends for continual improvements. Task completion time is tracked in Vivantio, which provides a useful metric in determining your bottlenecks.

Identifying your service pain points is the first stage in reallocating resources for improved service. Large organizations often track important dates within Vivantio, so scheduled reports can be sent to inform managers of start/finish and deliverable dates for changes and projects.

CONCLUSION

We hope you found this article useful in getting your workflows off the ground in our Visual Workflow Tool. Vivantio’s in-house implementation and support teams consist of ITIL-trained professionals who both have extensive knowledge with optimizing workflows and using the Vivantio platform to leverage the workflow tool to automate your processes. If you need more personal help with a specific workflow, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us directly.

A GREAT SELF-SERVICE PORTAL HELPS BOTH CUSTOMERS AND SERVICE TEAMS ALIKE

Not only does a great self-service portal free up a service team’s time, but users also prefer it. As customers are given the tools to solve their own technical issues, the service team can focus on more strategic work that delivers greater impact to the service desk, such as automating and streamlining workflows.

It’s important to remember that the premise behind a self-service portal is that it’s providing a service. The customer still needs to see the value of using a portal, which means that their answers are findable, new information is regularly updated, and service teams assist customers if they cannot solve their problems alone.

Let’s jump in and have a look at the ways you can successfully get self-service up and running for your internal support team.

DEFINE WHAT SERVICES ARE APPROPRIATE FOR SELF HELP

Begin by identifying which services take up most of your technician’s time and pinpoint tasks that customers can fulfill on their own.

Through examining your service reporting, you can identify trends in your service data, such as the number of requests associated with a certain issue and sorted that metric by the average time it takes to complete each action. For example, you may discover that your team receives 5 requests a week on “Installing office 365 on my local machine” and determine that it takes 20 minutes on average to close this type of request. Rather than continuing to address the same request one by one, write a comprehensive article on how a customer can do this themselves to save your team 10 days of service work per year.

At first, this may seem like a small change, but think about how much time you are going to save when it comes to other time-consuming tasks such as replacing printer ink or toner cartridges, installing software drivers, or diagnosing the reason a laptop’s internet is down. Not only have you reduced the time it takes your service team to handle simple and repetitive requests, but you have also empowered your customers by teaching them new skills.

Striking a positive experience with your customers, it is not uncommon to find a majority turning to the self-service portal first rather than coming directly to the service team to solve their issues.

ENABLE THROUGH EDUCATION

Your self-service portal cannot be a successful support channel if customers do not understand its benefits over sending an email or calling the service desk.

When you implement the self-service portal, take time to utilize its capabilities in order to educate new users and promote self-help. You can do this by:

• Setting up a comprehensive knowledge base to promote user guides, help videos, and FAQs
• Creating a service catalog to set expectations on available services
• Setting up chat channels so customers can have immediate discussions with available technicians regarding their open tickets
• Alerting users when assets are unavailable, such as when a file service goes down
• Using conditional fields in your ticket submissions to capture specific information on the request type

After implementing these changes, you will find that the portal becomes the preferred method for customers to submit tickets because it saves them time.

USE DATA TO BENCHMARK THE SELF-SERVICE PORTAL

The most successful self-service portals incorporate scheduled reporting to analyze where continual improvements can be made. It is crucial that you use data to benchmark your self-service portal against other support channels.

For instance, how long does it take the technician to solve a request through email versus the portal? The portal provides a dynamic environment to capture specific information based on the issue type, while email only provides a subject and body. A service team technician may require additional information provided by the customer if submitted via email, which lengthens how long a ticket remains open.

As you continue to migrate your service to the self-service portal, compare the completion time, the number of exchanged emails, actions, escalations, and total ticket volume with your other support channels. There can also be other tools to help gauge success such as surveys and article rating systems, depending on what tools you are using to build your self-service portal.

CONCLUSION

Armed with a greater understanding of the benefits of the self-service portal, it is easy to see why offering a solution like this for your customers makes sense. Not only do self-service portals provide better customer service, but teams can also do so at reduced time and cost. Setting up a self-service portal conscientiously by properly customizing and implementing all its features can help elevate an organization’s reputation and brand and make their service teams’ lives a whole lot easier.

–

Jessica Barrett Halcom is a writer for TechnologyAdvice.com, with specializations in human resources, healthcare, and transportation. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay and currently lives in Nashville, TN.

SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE (SAAS) HAS TRANSFORMED HOW BUSINESSES MANAGE SOFTWARE

There are many advantages of choosing a SaaS provider for IT and other service departments. So, the question for many teams has shifted from “Should we invest in SaaS?” to “Which SaaS product is right for our unique business challenges and requirements?”

Before choosing to partner with a SaaS provider, consider exploring the following areas to decide which solution provides the lowest investment risk.

SOFTWARE

What are the functional differences between a company’s SaaS and on-premise versions?

A SaaS model unarguably brings many advantages over a traditional on-premise solution, which often includes lower license costs, continuous updates, and reduced maintenance fees all without the hassle and concern of maintaining in-house infrastructure. Many SaaS service management providers deliver sophisticated platforms with the same flexibility of an on-premise solution, but with the added benefit of continual improvements. This means that the system continues to grow with the business, rather than being tied down to an outdated legacy platform.

The outdated concern that SaaS platforms are less flexible and secure than on-premise solutions has long been a thing of the past. The rise of open API platforms and state-of-the-art hosting services provides the opportunity for fluid information exchange between platforms with necessary security certifications such as ISO27001, SOC1, and SOC2.

You have chosen SaaS. Great! Now how do you determine which vendor is an appropriate partner?

How many versions have been released on their SaaS platform?

SaaS products, by the nature of their continual updates, expand to add functionality over time. The key to choosing an appropriate service management platform is that you need to invest in a proven product. Established solutions provide their customers with the benefit of a secure, highly functional, and adaptable system for their service management needs. In short, choose a product that is tested and trusted throughout an industry, rather than investing in a less mature solution.

WHO OWNS THE DATA?

How often and what types of backups are performed?

SaaS providers have different approaches to data ownership. Some vendors do not provide an open API platform, limiting the company’s ability to collect and store data. Other providers have embraced an open platform, allowing businesses to transfer data from the cloud to their own database or other SaaS platforms.

Service management providers can also offer a multitude of integration options with their platform, so companies can move their data to any other system inside the business.

SECURITY

What security certifications does their data center hold and were they independently assessed?

In a SaaS model, the IT Service Management vendor is responsible for storing its data and keeping the application up-to-date. Always be sure to ask potential vendors about the security certifications they hold. SaaS vendors do not typically own their own data servers, therefore it is imperative to research their partners as well. All data centers should be SaS570, SOC, ISO27001 and PCI compliant.

HIDDEN COSTS

Can there be hidden costs when choosing a SaaS Provider?

We have discussed how choosing SaaS over on-premise solutions can lead to a higher return on investment, but we have not looked at how different companies handle the costs of their features. Several providers offer cut-down versions of their products, requiring you to invest in a higher cost solution as your company grows. Other providers require you to pay for additional products to add on functionality to the base ticketing platform. Sometimes upgrades are not free and require expensive consultation from the SaaS provider when the decision is made to make a change. If you are looking for a platform that continues to grow with your business, make sure you contemplate the more costly packages required to fulfil all your business requirements.

IN SUMMARY

According to IDC, global spending on cloud computing will jump from $67B in 2015 to $162B in 2020 and that number is expected to grow. In fact, cloud computing is growing at an even faster pace than IT as a whole. The breadth and variety of SaaS offerings today means stricter, and more time-consuming research on the part of companies considering investing in a SaaS product. Fully understanding the nuances of each SaaS tool is not to be overlooked along the journey to purchasing the perfect IT Service Management product for your business.

For a comprehensive list of even more SaaS-related tips and tidbits, check out our whitepaper, 29 Questions to Ask Before You Invest in a SaaS ITSM Solution

IT'S IMPORTANT THAT YOUR SERVICE DESK STAYS RELEVANT.

In the world of IT service management, as in most areas of business operations, it is more important than ever for service desks to stay on top of the latest trends and knowledge that’s being circulated.

Failing to remain “tapped in” runs service desks the risk of losing relevancy or missing opportunities to connect and interact with their customers.

ARE YOUR CUSTOMERS ENGAGED?

With the levels of self-service provided by the likes of Amazon, ASOS, and Zappos, service desks are under mounting pressures to match their service levels, despite having fewer resources. In fact, The Service Desk Institute (SDI) has research that shows that a whopping 64% of service desk professionals keenly recognize this pressure and are ready to respond.

Yet, in an industry where technology is developing at a rapid pace, many service desks struggle to do self-service well. However, unlocking the potential of this technology can greatly increase service desk efficiency and customer experience.

LEARN FROM SELF-SERVICE EXPERTS

In partnership with SDI, Vivantio staged and recorded a webinar where you’ll hear about how self-service has been successfully used by real organizations to improve customer satisfaction as well as drive efficiency of the service desk.

In the webinar, Vivantio’s Helen Heyns will be sharing real customer stories and her industry expertise:

“The Self-Service portal (SSP) plays a key role in the customer experience; it’s the shop window and it represents your professionalism, brand and competence in dealing with your customer’s queries and issues. I would love to show you how a well-built self-service portal will improve the efficiency and performance of your teams and in turn increase organizational ROI.” – Helen Heyns, Senior Technical Consultant, Vivantio

From this webinar, you will learn:

• What a Self Service Portal is and how it works
• An array of Self Service Portal best practices
• The multitude of benefits a Self Service Portal brings to the service desk, to customers, and to the overall business ROI – if it’s done right
• Why investing in a new or improved Self Service Portal now can be a sound decision.

CAN VIVANTIO BE USED AS AN ALM TOOL?

The answer is yes. Vivantio is flexible enough to be configured to model your development processes, whether you’re using Agile, Scrum, Waterfall, Spiral, or some combination of these. The combination of multiple ticket areas, workflow, asset, and knowledge management gives you almost everything you need.

WHAT CAN’T VIVANTIO DO?

There’s still a couple of things Vivantio can’t do. Some examples are:

• Source control
• Software development

SHOULD I USE VIVANTIO FOR ALM?

Probably not, at least not just Vivantio. Using it with a combination of tools like Team Foundation Server would be a more optimal solution.

That being said, there is definitely a place for Vivantio in your ALM activities. It is very unlikely your developers will want to share their ALM software suite with the support team. However, there is a good chance that Vivantio can help a support team supplement their development team’s efforts.

WHAT ARE TRIGGER RULES?

Trigger Rules is a mechanism that Vivantio users can use to automate processes. The basic concept behind Trigger Rules is:

When a certain condition is met, an action occurs.

They are useful in a wide range of scenarios, but a few common examples are:

• Sending out surveys after a ticket is closed.
• Automatically setting the ticket priority when a specific category of ticket is logged.
• Taking a ticket off “Hold” when it is updated by a customer.

HOW DO THEY WORK IN PRACTICE?

We’ll use a very specific example to help explain: sending an SMS via Twilio for a CopperEgg alert.

(Note: For this example, we will assume you have already set up a CopperEgg Web Method integration and a Twilio Webhook integration.)

BUSINESS RULES

Under Admin » System Areas » Incidents, you will find a menu option for “Business Rules”:

Within this section, there are three different types of rule available:

• Routing – These are simple rules to assign new tickets to specific groups or users.
• Escalation – These are time-based rules used to take action on tickets as SLA targets are approached or breached.
• Trigger – This is the focus of our example and where you can set an action to occur when a specific condition is met.

Under the Trigger Rules tab, you will be able to click the “Add” button, which will bring you to the following screen:

Under this screen, you will have a few elements to fill out:

• Rule Name – This is where you can name the rule to whatever you want.
• Execute When – You will have the choice beween “Ticket first meets condition” and “Matching Ticket updated”. “Ticket first meets condition” will only execute the action the first time a specific ticket meets the condition. “Matching Ticket updated” executes the action whenever a matching ticket is updated.

To explain each content tab, let’s run through them:

Select Tickets

This is where you will use the Vivantio Expression Builder to set the condition. For our example, we will set this for “Run this rule for tickets with the CopperEgg Alert category” as seen below:

Timing

This is where you can set timing rules around when the action is completed. For our example, we will want to select the default option of “Immediately”, because we want the SMS to be sent out as soon as the ticket is created:

There might be scenarios where you want to delay the action. This is where you can control that.

Actions

This is where we define the action that takes place once the condition is met. There are a number of different processes available, but, for our example, we’re only interested in “Send SMS via Twilio” under Webhooks:

Under that option, it will bring you to a screen where you can set the recipient and text sent. You can also leave an optional note regarding the action.

After saving the rule, you have finished. With this example, the next time CopperEgg creates an alert, the SMS you created will be sent and be noted in Vivantio: