The Power of a Unified Platform: IT Leaders Share Their Stories
In the IT Service Management space – many tools offer basic ticketing, some automation and other features. But very few offer IT Service Management (ITSM), Project Portfolio Management (PPM) and Enterprise Service Management (ESM) with enterprise-level integration and automation on one platform.
Having all functions within a single tool has many benefits and can be a real game-changer for businesses and organizations across industries including:
- Streamlining Operations: With a unified platform, you can consolidate your operations, eliminating the need for multiple tools and interfaces.
- Efficient Resource Capacity Planning: PPM enables you to prioritize and manage all your projects in one place, enhancing visibility and control. When you can see all resources, tickets and projects together, you can better determine workloads and priorities. This can help to balance ticket and project work across different functional roles and avoid conflicts and burnout.
- Holistic Service Management: ESM ensures a consistent approach to managing services across your entire organization, improving customer satisfaction and productivity. With a no-code ESM platform, you can extend ITSM practices out to other areas of the organization (HR, marketing, finance, etc.) for a consistent and holistic approach to service management and delivery.
- Integration and Automation: These capabilities simplify complex processes and reduce manual effort, freeing up your team to focus on strategic initiatives. When this is natively part of your ITSM suite you can better integrate and automate processes across your ENTIRE organization, not just within IT.
Below are stories from IT leaders at businesses and organizations that have made the switch to a unified platform for ITSM, PPM and ESM with integration and automation. Their insights will underscore how a unified service management tool not only boosts efficiency and productivity but also gives your organization a competitive edge.
Better Together: The Power of One Platform for Modern Service Management
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,” explained 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.
Another way Frontwave is meeting increased demand for service and growth is by having a self-service portal supported by a robust knowledge base.
“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.”
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 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,” Estrada said. “Our biggest focus is on delivering the best experience, products, and service to our members.” And TeamDynamix is there to support that.
It’s a similar story at Pima County where they’ve also taken a single-platform approach to service management and delivery.
“TeamDynamix is a place where we are really trying to kickstart and accelerate the ideology that automation with the right tools can bring value not just to IT, but to other departments within our organization,” said Mark Hayes, information technology leader, “We’re starting in IT so that they can see the possibilities as we move forward with our digital transformation and expand outside of IT.”
Pima County made the switch to TeamDynamix after using a different system for the last 10 years. Traditionally, the county has taken in tickets through email, phone and a service catalog with base-level triage, but with TeamDynamix in place, they will be able to leverage self-service and automation to serve its citizens better and reduce the drain on employees and resources.
One process automation, in particular, that’s saving significant time is onboarding and offboarding employees – something every organization deals with.
“You don’t need to waste so much time when it comes to onboarding,” Hayes said. “It really is such a sour experience for a new hire to come in, in this day and age, and sit around for three days waiting on their computer to show up. We need to get out of that mode and iPaaS will help us do that.”
And when it comes to offboarding Hayes said, “As a government organization we get audited by the state every year and they want to know what these stale accounts are doing sitting here. Offboarding is currently a very manual process – having to review the list from HR of people who are no longer employed with us and manually revoke their privileges from all the different systems and software and disable their accounts. There’s absolutely no reason for that to not be automated.”
Festival Foods, a grocery store chain that operates about 40 grocery stores and supports 9,000 employees with an IT staff of 40, including a seven-member service desk, also uses TeamDynamix for both ITSM and PPM, as well as iPaaS.
“Before, we had no project governance process,” Alex Turek, IT service desk manager, explained. “It was very ad-hoc. Whoever could scream the loudest got the most IT resources. Finding a tool that also included PPM was huge.”
Managing projects and IT services within the same platform has brought significant benefits, leading to improved efficiency and accountability.
“Technicians can see their project work and their IT work in one space,” Turek said. “This means it’s easier to communicate and ensure follow-through. Project managers can assign tasks to my service desk team within the same dashboard they’re using to resolve tickets. Those pop right up, helping them be aware of all their tasks and priorities so they can easily meet their deadlines.”
The next step for Turek and his team is to leverage the integrated Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) capabilities within TeamDynamix to automate their most repetitive processes.
“We’re looking to automate tasks such as password resets, user account deactivation, user onboarding and other tasks we do often, so we can reduce the daily workload on our team,” Turek said.
Can your organization benefit from a unified tool for service and project management? Read more customer stories and see what other IT leaders are doing in your industry here.