A pain point we hear often from IT is that the IT help desk can’t triage tickets appropriately in these older systems – often all IT tickets are going into one queue, and sometimes this is happening via email which means that things like ticket categories are not in use.
Ultimately teams need to sift through all of the tickets manually and decide where to put them – this activity alone is draining valuable resource time and causing massive delays for end-users.
Many of these older IT service management software systems don’t offer automation, or maybe they do but it was never implemented correctly, so now the IT service desk is left spending hours each day reviewing tickets and assigning them manually.
So why are so many teams still moving tickets manually?
There are really two reasons. One is that their current ITSM platform doesn’t have automation or workflow capabilities; and the other is that while it does, it may be complicated to implement, maybe even requiring technical resources or programming to build the automation. And with resources already hard to come by, it’s likely not going to be utilized.
“Our previous tool worked great, but it was very limiting when it came to scaling our IT services and growing what we wanted to do,” Keyon Farrier, service desk manager at Legacy Supply Chain Services, said. “We really needed an ITSM tool that was an extension of our current IT infrastructure team. We wanted a system that could be self-sufficient and really act like an added member of our team.”
Farrier said they began their search for a better, more structured tool using the services of Info-Tech, a technology consulting and research firm.
“We started our search with Info-Tech looking at just change management tool to add to our existing ITSM tool at the time, then realized we also wanted to find a tool that could help us automate processes,” he said. “Info-Tech provided us with some great options, so we started the vetting process and found that TeamDynamix really fit our needs – not just for change management and automation, but for everything.”
“We were blown away by all that TeamDynamix offers, and our renewal was up with our former ITSM tool so we decided to just replace it all,” Farrier said. “We were really excited about the out-of-the-box features from TeamDynamix and knew the tool would help not just with change management and automation, but with some of the other challenges we were facing as well.”
As a result of the switch to TeamDynamix “we’ve become a lot more efficient as a team because we’re getting the right tickets to the right people faster,” said Farrier. “We can now respond to service requests quicker as well. And we have a lot more visibility in terms of reporting.”
In TeamDynamix, automation and workflows are created using drag-and-drop functionality so there is no programming or coding required to set up automations. Anyone with access to the tool can start building out automated workflows for a variety of tasks.
When building out automation, there are many different methods that can be used:
- Approval Step – The Approval Step allows a workflow to notify one or more approvers and wait for them to decide how the workflow should proceed.
- Branch Step – The Branch step allows administrators to manage branches more easily in workflows with multiple paths.
- Choice Step – The Choice step allows a workflow to present a user or group with multiple choices in order to progress through a workflow.
- Collector Step – The Collector Step joins several paths of a workflow and waits for ALL of the paths preceding it to complete.
- Condition Step – The Condition Step allows a workflow to automatically route, one way or another, based on the values on the ticket.
- Notification Step – The Notification step allows a workflow to automatically notify one or more recipients.
- Task Step – The Task Step adds a Ticket Task to the ticket, with settings defined in the workflow.
- Timer Step – The Timer Step causes the workflow to wait until a specified time passes.
- Web Service Step – The Web Service Step allows organizations to automate processes by calling an external RESTful web service.