City of Goodyear, AZ Adopts ITIL for Faster, Better IT Service Delivery
CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT
These days, it’s almost a given to assume that IT departments are understaffed and overextended. However, “it’s one thing to say we’re overworked—and it’s another to be able to illustrate this with concrete data,” said Lisa Faison, deputy CIO for the City of Goodyear, Arizona, municipal government.
Having the data to back up this assertion makes all the difference in justifying a larger investment in resources to organizational leaders. With the help of TeamDynamix, Faison and her colleagues in Goodyear’s IT department have been able to do just that, which has led to better IT service for the city’s nearly 1,000 employees.
Combining ITIL with Automation for Better IT Service Management
A few years ago, the City of Goodyear didn’t have any way to track the status of IT projects. The city government had a ticketing system for managing the delivery of IT services, but this system was very limited in what it could do and what information it could provide.
“We wanted to increase the maturity of our IT operations by moving to ITIL processes,” Faison said.
This meant bringing the oversight of IT services and projects together under a single platform for IT Service Management (ITSM) and Project Portfolio Management (PPM) that gave leaders a holistic view of the work employees were doing. What’s more, the platform had to allow for simple configuration and automation of IT processes, without a lot of coding or administration needed on the back end.
TeamDynamix has aptly met these requirements, positioning the city well for growing its IT maturity.
On the IT service side, the platform has allowed the city to set up a service catalog and a self-service portal that routs tickets to the correct staff members for fulfillment automatically, reducing the number of times that service tickets bounce around from one person to another. This has helped speed up incident response times significantly.
“We wanted to increase the maturity of our IT operations by moving to ITIL processes.”
“We did a training roadshow,” Faison said, whereby IT staff met with various departments and showed them how to use the self-service portal. They also handed out pens with the link to the portal etched on the side. This internal marketing campaign has contributed to widespread adoption, with about three-fourths of service requests now being submitted through the portal— and this is leading to faster resolution for employees.
Automated workflows have also helped streamline key processes and improve the delivery of IT services. For instance, the IT team established an automated workflow within TeamDynamix for purchasing hardware and software, with requests being routed automatically to the appropriate people for approvals.
“It’s a nice, fully automated workflow,” Faison said. “We’d like to implement automated workflows in other areas moving forward as well.”
Data-Driven IT Resource Allocation
On the project side, TeamDynamix gives the city’s IT department a simple way to evaluate, approve and manage projects of all sizes. Managing IT projects and service requests within the same platform gives leaders a holistic view of the work that team members are doing.
“It helps us evaluate whether we can take on new projects based on the people we have available,” said Remi Nunez, senior IT project manager. And this is critical for reducing resource drain.
Having clear data showing the scope of the work that team members are doing also gives IT leaders the evidence they need to advocate for additional staffing in areas that require it.
For instance, Faison and her colleagues knew the GIS team had a constant backlog of work, but they weren’t able to quantify this challenge before. With TeamDynamix reporting, they were able to demonstrate this need and hire another full-time GIS employee.
One year into using TeamDynamix, having better visibility into project and service information has helped the city’s IT department improve customer service for employees—and the city has only begun to scratch the surface of what the platform enables.
As Goodyear’s IT maturity continues, Faison and her colleagues will be looking to use the data they collect on IT projects to accurately forecast the amount of time that new projects will take, so they can allocate resources to projects more effectively. They also plan to help other city departments use TeamDynamix for enterprise-level service and project management.
Faison’s advice for getting the most out of the platform: “Think about what questions you’d like to ask of the data you’re collecting.” TeamDynamix is a powerful tool for supporting data-driven decision-making, she notes—and understanding what you’d like to know can help organizations take full advantage of the platform’s capabilities.