As organizations continue to battle resource constraints and increased requests for service, many are evaluating the legacy IT service management (ITSM) tools they have in place and finding they no longer serve their service management strategy.
In a recent panel, Angela Neria, CIO at Pittsburg State University, touched on this topic saying, “We don’t have enough IT professionals, anywhere. There is a huge drain and we’re all experiencing this.”
We hear this over and over – there’s a significant shortage of resources. And between the great resignation and the move to remote work plus the increase in demand for resources to support a mobile workforce, IT departments are struggling to keep up. When you add to this ITSM platforms that require a team of admins and developers to manage, and a lack of automation it’s no wonder organizations are struggling.
One way to address these problems is to switch to a codeless ITSM platform that includes an automation and integration layer. That’s what these three organizations did, and the results have been extremely positive.
Nutrabolt Automates Ticket Assignment, Creation of Accounts, Tracking and More
“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.
Supercharged ITSM with Automation
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.”
City of Avondale Leverages Portal, Automations Across Departments for Better, Faster Service
City governments must serve their citizens effectively, often with limited staff. The TeamDynamix enterprise service management (ESM) platform plays a critical role in helping multiple branches of the City of Avondale, Arizona, government work better together. With a more efficient organization, the city can respond to citizens’ needs faster and more effectively. By leveraging a single portal with automated request routing and workflows, the team can be more responsive and transparent with citizens.
“Before, people would have to call or email our help desk with their service requests,” says CIO Jeff Scheetz. “However, now with the portal, IT has been able to create workflows and automation, rather than managing the many email and ticket requests. The workflow ensures that the requests are handled efficiently and provides additional reporting capabilities. Before, it was hard to prioritize tasks without a full view of what was going on.” In just a little over a year, Scheetz and his staff transformed the delivery of IT service for the city using the TeamDynamix platform.
Streamlining the Employee On-boarding Process
TeamDynamix is helping to improve interdepartmental collaboration. For example, onboarding new employees is a multistep process that used to be quite cumbersome.
Once new hires have completed all of the paperwork required by HR, they also need network privileges from IT. They have to be added to the city’s payroll system, and they need access to the building from Facilities.
This process used to involve a lot of paper shuffling, and it could take a while to complete. Now, the entire workflow can be initiated with a single service request that is routed to the various departments automatically.
“We can make sure we’re addressing all of our needs expeditiously,” Scheetz said. Having an automated system that keeps everyone on the same page has made working remotely much easier for city employees during the pandemic. Although in-person operations have resumed, “if someone needs to work from home, we can easily accommodate that now,” he said.
Making a ‘Huge Difference’
TeamDynamix has not only helped streamline workflows and improve communication among city employees; it also provides key insights that help leaders manage their departments more effectively. “We can see trends and patterns that help us deploy our limited resources in a more intelligent manner,” Scheetz explains.
Leaders can see how much time various tasks are taking, so they can plan better for the future—such as by justifying additional hires or reassigning staff to other projects. Leaders can also see which service categories are getting the most requests, which helps with resource allocation as well as troubleshooting. If there are a lot of support tickets related to a certain piece of software, this might indicate that staff needs more training on how to use it, or it might be time to look for a system that’s easier to use. Having this insight allows IT and other departments to be more proactive in solving problems.
Benefits of Having Asset Management Together with Tickets & Projects
Avondale’s IT department also uses TeamDynamix for tracking and managing IT assets. Before, this information was scattered across multiple systems. Now, Scheetz and his team can see everything in one place, which makes it easier for them to understand the department’s infrastructure needs. Scheetz’s department is creating a project management office (PMO), and TeamDynamix will facilitate the management of IT projects as well. Aided by the platform, the PMO will implement a formal intake process for evaluating projects, prioritizing them, and allocating resources appropriately. TeamDynamix has enabled employees to streamline city operations and deliver better service to Avondale residents. The system’s versatility has added a tremendous amount of value to the city government. “Everybody has a limited staff,” Scheetz says of municipal organizations. “Having a system like TeamDynamix makes a huge difference.”
University of Michigan Saves Money, Improves Efficiencies with Workflows
With a community of 46,000 students and 25,000 faculty and staff on the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus alone, providing high-quality, collaborative IT services is a significant undertaking. It requires well-designed tools and processes that are laser-focused on customer service and aligned with the university’s goals.
A Focus on IT Service Management
Information and Technology Services (ITS) developed a vision for what it hoped to achieve, with the goal of better serving users and delivering an exceptional customer experience. The university’s ITS team set out to find an IT service management (ITSM) platform that could help them identify problems and repeated requests, automate workflows, and help users find their own answers to questions whenever possible. They also wanted to invest in a future vision that would allow them to embrace a true enterprise service. U-M discovered TeamDynamix.
The platform was easy to use, it was SaaS-delivered, and required no coding knowledge for users to create customized forms and workflows. The platform was flexible enough to support the university where it is now while positioning it for future IT processes. The university went fully live in four months. The scope of the initial launch included automated workflows for initiating and fulfilling service tickets; requesting, evaluating, and tracking the status of projects; and managing a rapidly growing knowledge base of articles.
Enterprise service expansion
The enterprise site licensing model for TeamDynamix allows the university to have more people resolving service tickets, resulting in improved problem resolution and an improved experience for students, faculty, and staff. This was put into practice amid the shift to remote learning when the pandemic emerged, helping ITS respond to a sharp spike in service requests.
Ease of administration
The platform also allows for distributed management, which the team administering the platform found to be helpful in setting up ticketing applications for multiple units across the university. University units such as Facilities and Operations, Shared Services, and the School for Environment and Sustainability have their own applications within the platform for fulfilling service requests. The tool allows units to manage their own ticketing applications by developing the detailed forms and workflows they need to support their own processes.
The combination of simplified processes, clear business objectives, and an appropriate tool to support them has resulted in improved IT service for faculty, staff, and students across the entire U-M community.
Want to hear more from companies who’ve made the switch to codeless ITSM? Check out our latest eBook: Automate IT – A Playbook for Supercharged ITSM