Case Study: Cloud & Operations
SITUATION & BUSINESS CHALLENGE
An American company providing technology-enabled e-discovery, forensics, data analysis, and other legal services wanted to consolidate its systems and improve internal workflow around service management. The company was utilizing JIRA for these efforts, and didn’t feel the technology was designed to accommodate the level of business automation they were looking for and realized they needed a better solution.
Numerous service-management solutions were considered, including Cherwell Software, but most lacked the flexibility and extensibility the company was seeking. However, one solution seemed to stand above the rest — ServiceNow.
Several top-level executives and managers, including the company’s CIO, had previous experience with ServiceNow. In fact, at the CIO’s former company, AIM Consulting had implemented and configured ServiceNow, leaving a positive impression on the CIO.
ServiceNow visited the company to discuss licensing and cost. As part of its presentation, ServiceNow asked AIM, a Bronze Services Partner, to present general and proof of concept demos on its behalf.
The company ultimately purchased several ServiceNow licenses, and AIM began to guide the company not only in improving service management, but also in integrating with their client-facing project and delivery systems for insights into the effectiveness of those processes for their clients.
SOLUTION
An AIM Consulting team consisting of a project lead and two ServiceNow developers began by implementing the core ServiceNow platform and its common service management modules, including incident/problem/change and request-based services. After achieving success in the early stages, the company saw further growth potential with ServiceNow and asked AIM to help guide it in higher-complexity projects:
Automating human resources (HR) processes
HR managers took note of the evolving use of ServiceNow and requested that the technology be used to automate some of its more tedious manual employee processes, such as onboarding, office moves, offboarding, and more.
Once many of those workflows were automated, efficiencies in HR services resulted in a better overall experience for employees. For example, as part of the onboarding process, the IT team that provides laptops started receiving fulfillment requests automatically as part of the onboarding process. The same was true for access needs and processing with other teams. HR now has all the information related to the employee’s new manager, seating, facilities, phone, and more, in an end-to-end process initiated from the single onboarding request.
Project portfolio management (PPM)
ServiceNow evolved further in the company with the implementation of project portfolio management (PPM) services, including demand management, project management, resource management, timekeeping, and more.
AIM worked with company managers to better understand the project demands they were receiving and to find ways to automate more of those processes. The project demands ranged from smaller requests for improvements and enhancements to larger platform demands for automating new processes. AIM Consulting worked with the teams to prioritize the projects according to level of importance and then to transition those demands into projects to be managed in the ServiceNow platform. The projects have different activities and tasks that employees and project participants can manage their work and allocate time toward, enabling more efficiency in resource management.
RESULTS
AIM Consulting’s guidance has enabled the company to evolve ServiceNow usage into almost every arm of the organization, to where it’s essentially now part of the company’s DNA, driving many of its internal business processes.
ServiceNow provides the glue that enables superior visibility into the company’s end-to-end processes, enabling tremendous efficiency gains, better reporting, stronger trend analysis, and an effective way to anticipate future project commitments. The organization has seen a huge improvement in its efficiency around these processes and now has far fewer manual processes than before.
During these projects, AIM Consulting worked in conjunction with the company’s development team, and in this way, IT managers came to understand the aspects of a strong ServiceNow developer. As a result, the company has since built its own internal capability for ServiceNow.
