With many organizations struggling to alleviate the pressure their IT departments are feeling trying to tackle integration backlogs with limited resources – many are making the switch to no-code IT service management (ITSM) software.
If you’re considering a switch in ITSM tools, there are a few key features you should focus on, including:
- A codeless platform with automation and integration capabilities – The ITSM software you pick for your organization should be easy to use, easy to own and easy to operate. Codeless ITSM platforms are a great place to start. Not only do they have the flexibility you need, but they also often have a lower total cost of ownership as you don’t need a full team to manage the software. In fact, with a codeless system, you can empower employees across the organization to manage their own portal and tickets. You can also supercharge your ITSMwith tools like iPaaS. Low-code/no-code automation tools like iPaaS are a great way to automate and integrate systems across an organization and reduce toil.
- A customizable self-service portal with a searchable knowledge base – With a searchable knowledge base and easy-to-use portal you can save time and resources by allowing customers to solve their own issues instead of calling your help desk or submitting tickets. With the right knowledge base and portal in place, you can reduce the amount of time that IT staff must spend fielding calls, answering questions and routing requests- instead, freeing them up to focus on more strategic work.
- Full support for ITIL that’s scalable outside of IT – ITIL stands for Information Technology Infrastructure Library, and describes the processes, procedures, tasks and checklists that can be applied by an organization as part of an overall IT strategy; to improve customer delivery; or to maintain a certain level of competency organization-wide. Any ITSM software you invest in should allow you to be ITIL aligned as much, or as little, as needed depending on your organization’s IT maturity. Many organizations implement ITIL to ensure they have a common vocabulary and methodology surrounding request fulfillment and incident response – both within IT and outside IT when using ESM.
Nutrabolt Achieves Faster, Easier IT Support with Automated & Flexible ITSM Platform
“We had a help desk tool in place, but it was not purposefully built,” explains Mark Dittenber, Director of IT at Nutrabolt. “It was very generic, and there was no discipline in the use of it.”
Mark and his staff needed a highly flexible and customizable platform that could support new IT processes with automated workflows now, and into the future, as the company’s IT operations continued to mature “I liked the lightweight nature of TeamDynamix, as well as its ability to scale with our needs,” he observes.
Mark and his team were able to implement TeamDynamix in a matter of weeks. They began with IT service management (ITSM) and have now expanded to include project management. All the configurations and automation are created without any technical resources on a no-code platform.
Within TeamDynamix, Mark and his Team established customized forms and automated workflows to create network accounts, assign rights and privileges to new teammates, submit and track service requests, request and approve IT changes, provision new devices and more. As they create new IT processes from the ground up, they’re also building out a knowledge base and a self-service portal. Having thoughtfully crafted processes in place — and the right enterprise service platform to support them — has already made a big impact in just a few months.
The improvement has been most noticeable in the onboarding of new teammates. “As we’ve formalized this process and improved our workflows, we’ve cut down on the number of follow-up calls required,” Dittenber said.
Improving the delivery of IT service by establishing more mature processes helps Nutrabolt become a highly nimble organization as the company continues to expand. “We’ve got a lot of work left to do, but we’ve made significant progress,” he concludes. “We’ve already seen good results, people have embraced these changes, and we’ll continue driving improvement and simplicity for the organization.”
Gratz Bank Leverages Enterprise Service Management for Improved Workflow
Reliable IT service management is especially critical in a banking environment. The Gratz Bank is using the TeamDynamix platform to gain the visibility they need into technical operations and build sound change management processes. They are even using it outside of IT to help with enterprise service management.
Although The Gratz Bank’s use of TeamDynamix began with ITSM, other departments caught on very quickly and understood that the tool could be used to manage workflows throughout the organization. For instance, the accounting department saw there was an opportunity to help them create a better process around paying vendor invoices and expense reimbursements.
Hayes was able to set up an application for the accounting department, so employees could track the status of their reimbursement and know if vendor checks had gone out on time. This has made a positive impact on the department. Because TeamDynamix is highly flexible, The Gratz Bank can use it for a variety of applications beyond IT.
TeamDynamix has automated and simplified what can often be complex, multiple-step processes, making it easy for the IT team at The Gratz Bank to manage workflows. It has also improved their visibility into IT operations, so they can easily see how well they’re serving the needs of employees and where the most common technology-related problems are occurring.
“It’s a very configurable tool,” says Project Manager Katie Hayes. “Because we now have a robust help desk application available, we have much more visibility and can plan for our IT needs more effectively. Without this tool, we couldn’t do that.”
Concluded CTO Mark Yerger: “TeamDynamix has allowed us to take ownership of IT service management and create a foundation that we can expand on as our organization grows.”
Covenant HealthCare: ITSM and Projects Together for a ‘Single Pane of Glass’
Covenant HealthCare knew their IT department needed a better way to manage tickets and projects as the technology needs of employees, doctors, nurses and patients continue to evolve and grow, so they turned to TeamDynamix for help.
Covenant has been able to support the growing digital demands of healthcare. They are now over 90 percent fully electronic in their processes and using technology like TeamDynamix to fine-tune processes and improve the end-user experience.
“I believe the IT Department has done a successful job implementing a project when we can improve the efficiencies for our end-users and anytime that we can save them clicks, save them time, give them more time with their patients at the bedside I think is a big win for us,” Tyler Lamber, Program Administrator for Community Connect at Covenant Health, said.
Frank Fear, CIO at Covenant, recognized a change was needed as the tech expectations within healthcare started to shift, “Our patients expect technology. They expect certain things like virtual visits, they expect to be able to message their providers and they expect to be able to schedule an appointment online and not have to call a provider to make that appointment.”
And it’s not just the patients who expect technology. “IT moved from being something that helped the back-office employees, to something that’s involved in everyone’s job all the time,” Raymond Hall, Technology Manager at Covenant Health, said. “In healthcare, they need quick, fast access – like they’re running a kiosk or at a checkout line – but the amount of data, and the sophistication of the data, they need is the equivalent of someone sitting down to do a research paper. They’re asking to see a patient’s chart and an x-ray and all of this information, and they want to be able to get to that workstation and see it like that.”
For Fear, he needs the same level of data and sophistication but instead of patient information, he’s looking at the inner workings of the entire IT organization and all of the projects, tickets and requests that come in and out to support the network.
Fear said he also uses the dashboards in daily huddles with his team to set priorities and see what needs to be done, “I can report on our key strategic projects and see which project requests are coming in and be able to report status on those very cleanly and clearly through dashboards. I’m able to communicate to the organization the value that all these IT dollars are delivering.”
Hall said there’s been value in both the dashboards and daily scorecards Covenant uses by pulling data from TeamDynamix, “Once they saw the scorecards the team responded [by driving] the number of open tickets down. They’re paying attention to how many tickets they are closing a day and utilizing tasks and tickets to help determine their workload.”
Want to read more about why others are making the switch to TeamDynamix? Read our latest eBook: Automate IT – A Playbook for Supercharged ITSM.