Study Case
The Challenge
Cloud ITSM solution with ManageEngine Service Desk Plus™
Location
Italy
Date
October 2023
1. Collect every user request through a single platform, discouraging phone calls to report issues
2. Define templates for the most common requests with mandatory fields to facilitate the resolutions process
3. Build a Knowledge Base which contains the well-know and already resolved issues
4. Improve group work by providing a collaboration platform with the capabilities to assign tasks, define schedules and measure time analytics
5. Create a relational database where each company's asset was linked to a specific user or team
6. Automate internal procedures through the definition of workflows
The customer was looking for a ticket management platform that would allow to manage the requests made by their employees, facilitate team work and automate some internal procedures.
Previously, the users used to send requests to the IT Staff through various methods. Phone calls, meetings in person and email messages were frequently used. These made the work harder for the IT employees since they had to handle multiple contact channels at the same time. In addition, users were not forced to provide detailed issue information. This caused the need for the IT staff to make additional work to understand the problem cause, in order to be able to resolve it.
The only asset inventory system was an Excel™ spreadsheet which was created many years before and was updated once in a while manually. As a result, the file was missing lots of devices and at the same time contained tons of retired ones that were never deleted.
Some of the users request need to go through some approval steps before being fulfilled. This meant that the IT staff member who picked up the request needed to interact with multiple high level employees to obtain their approval. The process was carried out with phone calls and emails and thus was very slow and ineffective.
The Solution
We evaluated various ITSM products available on the market. Obviously, we wanted to deploy a top level solution, so we picked up the best Gartner ranked ITIL-compliant products. The majority of them was very effective in the ticket management but lacked in the Inventory section. Even if the inventory was available, only few of them offered a user-friendly relational database to map the relations between assets and users in a simple way.
We also wanted to have a full cloud product in order to avoid the additional maintenance tasks involved with an on-premise application.
Eventually, we went for ManageEngine Service Desk Plus. The customer appreciated the huge amount of functionalities offered by the product and its moderate price compared to the other equal level products.
At first, we focused on importing the assets. We crafted an Active Directory GPO to install the provided Agent on all the company’s workstations. The agent granted us the capability to periodically scan the hardware components and the software installed on it without manual intervention.
After that, we also imported all the relevant non-IT assets like keyboards, monitors etc. It was a very long work, but it was fundamental to have a comprehensive assets list and build a truthful relational DB. We used the built-in product’s function to generate bar codes and applied a tag to every asset so as to make it easy to identify it.
The second activity was user import. The customer did not like the idea of adding a new dedicated set of credentials for every user. Thus, since the company was already using the Microsoft 365 suite and every user had a personal account, we leverage the native Microsoft 365 integration to grant an SSO authentication to the ticketing portal.
After importing the users we defined the various roles and assigned each user to the proper one, which also included assigning technician licenses to each IT staff member. Last, we created technicians group based on the technicians expertise
At that point, we had to define the request templates. The ITIL framework defines two request categories: incident requests and service requests. For the incident requests, we gathered the most common issues happened in the last two years and we built a custom template for each request type, with a specific set of fields which could help the IT staff to quickly address the root cause. Then we moved onto service requests. In this case, we defined less template but we had to also create the automation that could speed up the approvals. We defined a specific workflow for each service request template with all the mandatory approval steps that were previously accomplished with phone calls and emails. By doing this, the approval mechanism was quite strict and allowed the company to easily monitor the time analytics and identify which approvers were delaying the whole process.
Next, we defined other automation processes such as the auto assignment of the requests to the proper technician group, based on the request type, and the notification rules. Each time a request was not handled in the time frame defined in the SLAs, an automatic email was generated to report the delay to both the requester and the specific technician group manager.
We taught the technicians on how to handle the ticket resolution process and highlighted the importance of adding the resolutions steps to the platform’s knowledge base in order to facilitate the resolution of repeated issues.
Eventually, we designed the Requester Homepage with the aim of building an intuitive user-friendly interface, customized with company’s logos and images. We started from the pre-built homepage templates and then added some additional HTML to customize it. Users had the capability to easily choose whereas to open an incident request, a service request or to read the knowledge base and try to solve their problems on their own. We also added an announcements section where technicians can publish useful information for the users.
Results
After adapting to the new working model, technicians agreed with on us on how the knowledge base had speeded up their daily work.
After some months the company appreciated so much the product that they decided to create a new instance to manage also the cafeteria. That’s another feature available on Service Desk, which give us the capability of creating up to 15 instances under the same tenant.