As technology has evolved for different parts of an organization, so have the technology stacks for departments like IT, HR, marketing and more. And as those tech stacks grow individually, so do the silos that creep up between departments. These silos can often cause communication issues, duplication of work and prevent organizations from having a clear picture of all of the projects and work happening throughout the business, as well as the resources dedicated to each task.
To combat these growing silos, many businesses and organizations are implementing a single platform approach to service and project management – meaning most projects (both within IT and outside of IT), as well as tickets for support, are handled using a single software for Project Portfolio Management (PPM) and Enterprise Service Management (ESM).
Here’s how three TeamDynamix customers are using this better together approach for ESM, PPM and IT Service Management (ITSM) within their organizations.
Transforming Service and Project Management at the City of Madison
At the City of Madison, the TeamDynamix platform is being used to support digital transformation initiatives with great success.
The team implemented TeamDynamix ITSM with PPM – focusing on self-service to kick off the city’s IT service delivery transformation according to Abigail Ferguson, Customer Success Manager for the City of Madison’s Information Technology.
“We are seeing the same resource constraints other cities are,” she said. “We are understaffed at times and need to focus on higher-value implementations. So, anything we can do to empower our users to find the resources they need for self-service is a must for us.”
Like many other businesses and organizations – the demand for service has gone up exponentially over the last few years as IT now has to support better digital experiences and a “service anywhere, anytime” mentality, even within the public sector.
To address the growing demand, the City of Madison is taking a proactive approach and combining Project Portfolio Management with ITSM using a single platform through TeamDynamix, “This is going to help us really get a sense of what projects align with our strategic goals. We can see what projects align with our service catalog that exist today and take a more proactive approach with our customers and other agencies,” she said.
This single platform approach for ITSM and PPM is also going to help the city identify what projects should be high priority and what projects can be turned down or scheduled for a later time, “In government, you can’t always say no – it’s more of a ‘we can do that later’ so we want to be able to support our staff and our citizens the best we can by prioritizing the work,” Ferguson said.
When it came to making the switch to TeamDynamix, improved communication and transparency were big factors. Both are things citizens were asking for when it came to doing business with the city.
Ferguson said the legacy ticketing system they were using only provided people “barebones” updates on the status of their tickets, “It was a black hole. They’d get these updates just at the start of the ticket and at the end when the ticket was complete,” she said. “We had a lot of complaints about that. Our customers wanted transparency, they wanted buy-in, they wanted to have a stake in their request and to be able to provide feedback to us.”
So when it came to switching to TeamDynamix, the culture was already in place to move forward and embrace a more transparent approach to service management and delivery.
“The IT customer portal specifically has been an ongoing selling point for us to get buy-in internally,” Ferguson said of the new portal launched with TeamDynamix. “As we started to implement [TeamDynamix] we’ve had good feedback from our helpdesk on what would be better for customers to submit through the portal or resolve through self-service.”
And it’s this readiness for change that’s led to the successful implementation of the new ITSM system and continues to power the organization as they better processes throughout IT and beyond.
“It’s been a journey of enabling folks to feel like they have the right to the knowledge that we all have had – nothing is secret anymore,” Ferguson said. “Our customers want to be able to participate, and every time we get feedback from our customers our user experience gets better and better, and we’re doing our jobs better.”
Frontwave Credit Union Transforming IT Operations and Member Experience
Frontwave Credit Union has adopted a digital-first strategy to deliver a heightened experience to all members. Based in Oceanside, California, Frontwave has experienced a lot of growth over the last few years and that’s resulted in many competing priorities as the organization continues to scale. Because of this, there is a renewed focus on understanding process excellence.
“We’ve dubbed this year the year of the process, and that’s where we are really focused,” explains Roger Estrada, Vice President of Process Excellence and the Program Management Office. “We are meeting this increased demand by restructuring what we do and how we do it by making our processes scalable, creating better escalation paths, providing self-service opportunities and prioritizing requests based on different criteria. But it all begins for us by really understanding our value stream and overall service flow.” Estrada and his team work cross-functionally with IT, Operations, Finance and many other groups to support the respective team’s initiatives.
As part of its digital-first strategy, Frontwave made the switch to TeamDynamix as it offered a unified platform that encompasses IT Service Management, Project Portfolio Management (PPM) and enterprise integration and automation (iPaaS). With a no-code platform, the team can reduce time spent on system administration and can roll out new functionality, workflows and integrations faster. As organizations seek to level up their key functions such as IT service delivery and to initiate digital transformation, many are requiring new technology solutions to be no-code.
For most IT organizations, there’s been a real uptick in demand – especially when it comes to digital transformation – causing a tsunami of requests that bog down IT teams.
With the influx of new tools and solutions being implemented to usher in a new digital experience and an evolution of user expectations to have fulfilling digital experiences – especially when it comes to customer service – it can be a real hornet’s nest for IT teams to manage.
A single platform approach allows IT leaders to engage in resource capacity planning to improve their technicians’ workloads and quality of life. Additional benefits of using a single platform for ITSM and PPM include:
- The ability to foster and promote process improvements through digital transformation
- Improved user experience for customers, employees, IT technicians and project managers.
- The consolidation of systems and applications for more efficient management.
- The ability to bring service and project management together.
Having a self-service portal supported by a robust knowledge base can be a great way to meet the increased demand from end users.
“The key to providing exceptional self-service, and getting people to adopt and use it, starts with being proactive and anticipating the needs of your users,” Estrada said. “You need to have a strong technology platform in place and build out your portal with a set of tools that allow users to find what they need with minimal effort, yet still provide an exceptional user experience.”
And at Frontwave, having flexible automation tied to the service portal is part of that exceptional experience as it can smooth out the escalation path when tickets come in through the portal and automatically get routed appropriately for resolution. The technology helps to streamline the way technicians work, allowing for more time to be allocated to strategic initiatives.
Within TeamDynamix ITSM you can quickly spin up a self-service portal supported by a knowledge base and can build out dynamic forms for additional automation – allowing you to manage requests quickly and efficiently as they come in.
In addition, Frontwave is looking to automate manual tasks that bog down resources. TeamDynamix can supercharge ITSM and PPM by integrating with enterprise systems, or it can be used to integrate any applications for data transfer and automation. This can include Workday, Salesforce, Teams, Slack, DocuSign, Office365 or any of the hundreds of solutions that make up an organization’s tech ecosystem.
“Our focus is really on improving our operational layer and looking to optimize with technology enhancements,” he said. “Our biggest focus is on delivering the best experience, products, and service to our members.” And TeamDynamix is there to support that.
Combining Service Management with Automation for Better IT Service
The construction industry can be very volatile, with a high employee turnover rate due to seasonal fluctuations in the workforce. A key challenge for the IT staff in this environment is the time spent onboarding and offboarding employees, issuing passwords and devices for new hires, and then keeping up to date on departures.
If construction firms don’t have a well-designed and automated system for managing IT service, “things can easily get lost or missed in the shuffle,” Jason Mohs, IT manager for the Walbec Group, said.
Based in Waukesha, Wisconsin, the Walbec Group is a vertically integrated organization of six companies that produce high-quality construction materials and deliver unparalleled professional design, engineering, and construction services.
When Mohs joined the company, approximately 90 percent of IT service requests were via email or phone. Help desk staff spent far too much time communicating with employees, collecting the information they needed to understand the problem completely, and passing requests along to the appropriate IT staff member. This process bogged down the already resource-constrained team.
By moving to TeamDynamix for ITSM with automation – Mohs said his team has seen several improvements.
To start, moving to a self-service portal for ticket creation has saved IT staff at least two or three minutes per service request.
Mohs’ team has used the platform’s capabilities to create a robust self-service portal with customizable service categories and an archive of knowledge base articles.
When Mohs joined Walbec, some knowledge articles were already in place but weren’t easily searchable. TeamDynamix provided an easy way to store, organize, and make these assets available to employees. To build out these resources, Mohs has made it a goal for every IT staff member to create or edit at least one monthly knowledge base article.
The IT team has also built a comprehensive service catalog within the portal, complete with dynamic forms for quickly collecting information about the exact nature of an employee’s problem or service request. Mohs and his team have promoted using this portal for opening tickets throughout the company, explaining in staff meetings how employees can resolve their problems faster by using the portal.
These measures have streamlined the intake process for service requests dramatically. Often, employees can find answers to their questions or resolve their issues using the portal’s knowledge articles. They can initiate a service request within the portal if they can’t. The information collected during this process enables tickets to be routed automatically to the appropriate IT team member for a response — without help desk staff having to follow up and ask questions first.
Mohs now estimates that nearly three-fourths of service requests come in via the portal, saving the help desk team at least one to two minutes per request. With the volume of requests they get, “that makes a big difference,” he said. “It’s made us a much more efficient team.”
In addition, automated workflows have streamlined employee onboarding and offboarding while ensuring no steps are missed.
Mohs’ team has set up automated workflows within TeamDynamix to initiate critical tasks in provisioning passwords, technologies, and network privileges for new hires and revoking these items when employees leave the company.
As a result, IT staff are saving time on these repetitive and labor-intensive tasks. In addition, “We don’t miss things anymore,” he observed.
The efficiencies Mohs and his team have gained from using TeamDynamix have enabled them to focus on becoming more strategic. They’re using this extra time to take on projects they couldn’t get to before, such as cleaning up user accounts within Active Directory and addressing the root cause of frequent IT issues.
In turn, the end-users are experiencing better IT service and faster resolution of their problems, allowing them to do their jobs more effectively and enhancing the company’s bottom line.
“I’ve worked with other ticketing systems before,” Mohs concluded, “We are happy with the benefits we’ve realized so far, and we see a lot of potential for even further growth moving forward on the TeamDynamix platform.”