IT departments in all sectors are under a lot of pressure to use resources more efficiently. As budgets shrink and requests for services skyrocket, teams are busy finding new ways to keep up or improve service, while working with fewer resources. Here are three ways that organizations in all sectors can use IT resources as cost-effectively as possible.
1. Manage All IT Work on a Single Platform
In most organizations, IT service requests are managed with one software platform and projects are managed with another. Bringing IT Service Management (ITSM) and Project Portfolio Management (PPM) together within a single, unified platform can improve efficiency in many ways.
When resources are limited, IT employees often wear several hats. Few organizations have the luxury of maintaining separate staff for project work and fulfilling service requests. If employees have to use separate systems for tracking projects and service tickets, it’s hard to know which tasks they’re responsible for at any given time — and navigating between multiple systems and updating each one individually can be cumbersome. As a result, employees spend too much time on administration instead of their core responsibilities.
Having a single platform benefits IT leaders as well as employees. Managing IT incidents and projects in one location gives leaders an easy way to see the impact of both projects and support tasks on IT resources. This helps leaders plan more effectively, enabling more efficient delivery of technology services.
Benefits of Bringing PPM and ESM Together
Texas Woman’s University (TWU) came to TeamDynamix to update an aging legacy system. “We needed a solution for project management and ITSM as well,” said Heather Davis, manager of IT training and development.
As TWU Technology discovered in its evaluation, TDX provides an integrated ITSM platform to extend beyond IT to support facilities, admission, marketing, and HR. This one platform can expand and interact with PPM and resource management to meet both current and future university needs.
“One benefit of a centralized solution is it provides a holistic picture. With the ability to tie service usage to project and support requests, we can better manage prioritization and workload,” said Lena McLain, Sr. Applications Developer at TWU Technology. “ESM helps us align with the university’s strategic plan and goals while maintaining excellent service through the ITIL framework in ITSM.”
At Covenant HealthCare, CIO Frank Fear recognized the value in having a combined ESM/PPM strategy, “As the CIO, I have IT resources, and I need to assess their capacity,” he said. “I look at what capacity they have to work on projects, work on change requests, and work on support requests. At the 40,000-foot level, having a comprehensive project management solution that also operates with the service management platform, allows me visibility for insight into those areas, and allows me to plan for project-based work based on the capacity to handle support requests and change requests.”
According to Fear, like many other businesses and organizations, Covenant is becoming a digital business that provides healthcare, “Our customers need our support, so the demand is escalating and it’s only going to increase.”
Driving that increase, in part, for Covenant and hospital-based organizations nationwide, is the post-EHR (electronic health record) operation environment, “Just a small number of years ago, a relatively small percentage of patient care organizations in the United States had digital health records, so naturally, the first step was to implement EHRs… We’re now over 90 percent fully electronic in our processes. So now, we need to learn how to work differently, and we need to leverage information technology to help create those process and performance changes,” Fear said.
2. Embrace Self-Service
Many IT departments end up answering the same questions over and over again. This is very time-consuming, and it’s a waste of staff labor. Having users consult a self-service portal before contacting IT with their questions can reduce the number of inbound service requests by up to 70 percent, our internal data suggests.
Creating a self-service portal requires building a knowledge base of IT support articles. While this requires an up-front investment of time, it can pay off tremendously down the road.
Here’s how this works: Every time you have an incident, you document what the problem was, what the person was doing when the problem occurred, what technology they were using and how you resolved the problem. Then, you post this information online, so the next time somebody has that same problem, they can find the solution for themselves. We’ve seen organizations go from a handful of articles to thousands in just three or four months.
One of the best ways to develop a solid knowledge base for self-service is through the use of Knowledge-Centered Service® (KCS).
The principles of KCS stipulate that the creation and maintenance of knowledge must be fully integrated into the most important support operations.
Here are a few reasons why Knowledge-Centered Service can be so powerful:
- Helps to continually lower inbound call volume.
- Increases customer satisfaction.
- Provides customers with the answers they need now.
- Crowdsourcing knowledge helps maintain accurate content.
- Offers opportunities for professional development and career progression.
By adopting KCS, you can not only improve customer satisfaction but dramatically reduce the per-incident cost incurred by IT (from about $22 for a level 1 support call to $2 for self-service); and reduce the volume of issues and requests coming to the help desk, allowing IT to reallocate technicians to higher priority tasks and projects.
The Impact of Self-Service and KCS
The University of South Dakota (USD) struggled with knowledge residing in silos across various departments as well as poor communication, leading to inefficiencies when delivering service.
Katharina Wymar, head of Project Management, said “We lacked that one platform, that one mindset that allowed us to share knowledge.”
That’s when they turned to the solution of a knowledge base so that all of their information could be in a single, easily accessible location.
After building out their knowledge base and implementing KCS they quickly saw an 18% reduction in time logged to service tickets, and after six months there were 31,000 users, 262,000 page views, and 5,000 knowledge articles being included in the base.
In addition to a self-service portal, you can implement conversational AI as part of your self-service strategy. When you combine automation, self-service and conversational AI – you can have a positive impact on IT resource drain and improve the experience of your customers and end-users.
Conversational AI chatbots are intelligent software applications that can simulate human conversations and perform tasks such as answering questions, providing information and performing transactions.
Conversational AI leverages natural language processing and understands intent. While they do need to be trained, with conversational AI you can facilitate more complex conversations and resolve issues through actions vs. the traditional chatbot’s question/answer limited dialog path.
Bowdoin College is using a versatile conversational AI tool from TeamDynamix that seamlessly connects with enterprise software systems to retrieve key information and execute tasks. These include basic IT functions that a tech support employee would have to handle before, as well as non-IT questions such as what’s on the menu at a certain dining hall that day.
As a result, users are enjoying better—and faster—customer service, while help desk staff can focus their time and energy on more strategic work. “We’re just scraping the surface right now,” Jason Pelletier, senior director of client services and technology, said. “Eventually, I think we could have the bot handle up to 30 percent of the questions our help desk staff are getting now.”
Not only does the bot reduce the workload for IT support staff; but it also creates a better and more equitable experience for students.
“Some people are outgoing, and they have no problem coming to our Tech Hub for technical support,” Pelletier explained. “Others have no problem communicating by email. But there are also many users with a language barrier or another reason why they might feel uncomfortable interacting with an actual person. There are also some users who are night owls and need support late at night when we’re closed. The chatbot allows us to meet users where they are and give them the assistance they need—whenever, wherever and however they might want it. If we can relieve even some of the stress they might feel, that enhances their experience.”
3. Develop an Effective Change Management Process
About 80 percent of unplanned downtime is accidentally caused by IT staff themselves, according to research from the IT Process Institute. For instance, a technician might be trying to update a switch, but it accidentally brings the entire network down. The problem resolution that ensues consumes valuable IT time, and it might have been avoided through better change management.
Improving change management involves developing an effective process for thinking through the potential impact of making an IT change, then deciding on a course of action that will cause the least amount of disruption. Effective change management can help prevent unforeseen complications, so your IT team spends less time resolving issues.
By adopting these three key strategies, your IT department can deploy staff time and budgets more judiciously, leading to more effective use of IT resources.
Change Management in Action
For organizations undergoing rapid growth with limited IT resources, change management should be a priority. At Northeast Ohio Medical University (NEOMED) they were struggling with unforeseen issues after each technology-related change. Using TeamDynamix for their ITSM, they were able to build out a comprehensive and well-thought-out change management strategy to address their issues.
“We set up a special form within the system called a change form, and whenever a production change is pending, we have the technical lead fill out that form,” Geri Hein, project manager within the university’s IT division, said. For larger changes, the change form is routed to a change control team that consists of Hein, a business analyst, the managers of the university’s IT infrastructure and database groups, and the IT director.
This process has increased communication within the IT Service Management team and helped with troubleshooting problems.
Now, whenever a change is coming, the key people who need to be aware are automatically notified in advance, so they can weigh in if they foresee any risks or dependencies in order to ensure a smooth transition. Changes are linked automatically to the ticket calendar feature within TeamDynamix, so IT staff can easily see which changes were made on which days.
“If there’s a problem, we can go to the calendar and determine whether it was related to a particular change or not,” Hein says. “There have been a few instances where our infrastructure team made changes that we didn’t think would cause problems with our ERP system, but they did. [Because of the change management process] we were able to track it back to the right source and easily resolve the issue.”
No formal change management process existed when Jason Mohs, IT manager, started working for the Walbec Group. “We’ve built one out in TeamDynamix, and it’s been very effective,” he said.
Whenever someone intends to make a change that will affect employees and IT systems, like updating software or implementing a new technology, they must submit a plan within TeamDynamix. This plan must describe what steps the change will involve, when the change will occur and why, and which other systems, technologies and users the change might affect. The plan is then reviewed and approved by the managers of the affected IT divisions.
This documentation process forces people to think carefully about the repercussions of any changes they make, thus reducing the chances that something will go wrong. It also creates a public record of the intended change. If something unexpected occurs, managers can quickly identify the cause of the problem and respond.
“I don’t have to email everyone in my department to find out what they did and when,” Mohs explained. “It takes away this potential time drain. Instead, I know exactly where to look to find what I need and troubleshoot if needed.” And because the information is all there, Mohs and his team can respond quicker if there’s a problem instead of trying to find where the issue originated.
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.”
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in November 2019 and has been updated with new information.