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City of Madison Transforms IT Service Delivery with No-Code Platform, Bringing ITSM and PPM Together

CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT

As state and local governments are looking to modernize legacy systems and kick off digital transformation strategies – many are finding their existing IT Service Management (ITSM) tools aren’t capable of supporting these initiatives.

Rather than spending excessive time and money trying to get these tools to fit, public sector organizations are investing in new, codeless ITSM platforms that include Project Portfolio Management (PPM), Enterprise Service Management (ESM) capabilities and integration and automation (iPaaS) – all on a single platform.

By using a platform that combines all of these functionalities and features, you can prevent resource drain, provide a better experience for citizens and improve internal processes and efficiencies both in IT and throughout other departments.

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.

“Our client portal will really open up the gateway to all city staff to be able to request IT services and also access the self-service portion of our portal,” Ferguson said. “It’s really going to be a game changer for us because it will be consolidating all of the different places people used to go for resources.” With this key pillar in place, the team can further build out the knowledge base to expedite self-service resolution.

Using Self-Service and a Knowledge Base to Reduce Resource Drain

The IT customer portal has been a big project for the City of Madison IT team. Not only will it consolidate all of the different resource areas currently in use, but it will house two knowledge bases. The first is an internal IT knowledge base that will serve as a place for IT staff to quickly locate information and answers as needed to address tickets and requests.

The second knowledge base will be geared towards self-service for staff and citizens who want to locate answers themselves. “This will allow us to attach articles to tickets and teach people along the way how to find the answers they need. This will really empower our customers with resources and knowledge,” Ferguson said.

And ultimately, this improved self-service experience will help the city IT team lower ticket volumes.

“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.”

Addressing the Changing Landscape of Public Sector IT Service

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.

“Demand for service is skyrocketing,” Ferguson said. “But our staff levels have stayed relatively the same.”

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.

And reactively, Ferguson said they really want to lean on utilizing their ITSM tool and tickets to help staff better manage their time and improve efficiency.

“We historically haven’t tracked the amount of time we spend on resolving tickets or on a project or task,” she explained, “So we are asking everyone to do that now using our tool so that we have a better picture of what expenditures do we have (in terms of staff time) and then we can use that to have a holistic view of resources so we can do resource capacity planning.”

Once they know their baseline for certain tasks and projects they’ll be able to identify areas where they might be able to make process improvements and provide a quicker, better customer experience.

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.

Bringing Transparency, Improved Communication to Citizens

When it came to making the switch to TeamDynamix, improved communication and transparency were big factors. Both were 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.”

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