Historical retreat
Until recently, HP Service Desk 4.5 for the automation of ITSM processes was practically the standard in the corporate world. The first version of HP SD was released in 2002, and in 2012, after 4 major updates, official support for the system was discontinued. Of course, given the popularity of the system in the corporate segment, it was replaced by Omnitracker, which, in fact, was a continuation of the “cult” 4.5. It was originally made with an eye to replacing the HP SD, so its interface did not differ much from its older brother, although the functionality has expanded 10 years later since the release of the first version of HewlettPackard. HP also wanted to make a continuation of the ITSM system - Service Management Automation X, but now it is not successful on the market.
In 2020, any enterprise business needs process support and tools to effectively conduct business, both external and internal. To work with ITSM and ITIL, you no longer just need to understand what it is, but also reduce the cost of maintaining these processes, for example, by using the right tools. Over the past 2 years, a trend has emerged to use fast, flexible and versatile tools, simplify and move towards flexibility of business processes with a reasonable level of bureaucracy and rigor. Companies are moving away from multi-million dollar solutions with dozens of modules of which only a fraction will be used.
Project start
Now about the project. At the time of the start of the project, the bank had HP Service Desk 4.5, the task was to switch to using Atlassian products in all possible departments (IT department, PMO, AXO, HR, Lawyers, etc.). The project started with the IT department. We conducted a discovery phase to study the department's business processes, their connections with other departments of the bank, determined the scope and objectives of the project and formed a work plan. At this stage, the peculiarities of working with a client-bank began to appear. A bank is a huge structure, practically a small state, with an internal policy, interests and a course of development. For example, getting access to the server may take not an hour or two, as in an IT company, but several days, during which the request will go through all the rounds of approvals and checks. To reduce the critical path of a project,we planned work in several parallel streams: tasks that are on the bank's side and our tasks. During this time, we have already accelerated the processes of communication from classic mail and replies the next day to faster messengers, and began to hold more personal meetings.
During product introductions and process reorganizations, we encountered unnecessary complexity in some processes. For example, at the start of the project, the bank had over 90 different processes, with a different set of departments involved and related tasks that are waiting for each other only to manage changes. Some types of changes could be carried out no more than 2 times a year because in total their implementation took half a year. For such cases, we recommended changes in business processes. It is clear that this is not possible everywhere due to legal, regulatory and bureaucratic restrictions, but, for example, in the case of change processes, when revising them, it turned out to be reduced to 46, which made the settings more unified.
As sometimes happens when introducing new systems, during the release into production we faced resistance from employees who were used to working in the old system. But our direct customer was the head of the department, so we overcame the resistance quite tough. To simplify the commissioning of the system, during the implementation of the project, we applied an iterative approach to releases with intermediate results, therefore, an administrative decision was made to disable the process in the old system when it was ready in the new one. Yes, of course, for some time the bank needed to use 2 systems; for example, user requests were already processed in Atlassian, and change management was in HP SD. But it gave the employees time to get used to the new environment, and also allowed us to get quick feedback.
Technological stack
Using our expertise and the existing IT structure in the bank, we jointly built a support service of four lines. The zero line works in Jira Service Desk, it performs the initial processing of requests for internal users and ensures that the established SLAs are met for all requests. Next, tasks are escalated to the first and second lines of support, and employees work on tasks in Jira Software. This approach allows you to divide the tools by purpose. Employees of the first, second, third line do not always need the capabilities of the classic Service Desk. These people, and there are more than 100 of them, usually perform the assigned task one after another, and they do not need to see the flow of everything that comes to IT support.
As a trump card in the sleeve, the third line remains. For them, tasks are created within the bank, this line includes internal developers, testers, analysts. They fix software bugs or develop new ones. There is an opportunity to transfer a task to such an internal team only if all previous lines could not solve the request for some reason, or if it is a Change request.
In addition to IT, the AXO and PMO departments have also switched to the new system.
The AXO department has its own set of requests, that is, its own portal on the service desk, and the PMO uses classic Jira Core projects for internal tasks.
On top of the ITIL standard
Speaking about the classic support service, we can't help but dwell on ITIL. The bank has implemented probably the most classic set of processes for such projects:
- (Incident management). . , .
- (Problem management). , .
- (Request fulfillment). — . , , , .
- (Change management). , . , , .
- (Configuration management). . , , , , . Insight — Asset management, .
- Knowledge Management (Knowledge management). Responsible for managing information about the system as a whole. Provided services for users, available infrastructure, standard user instructions. All of this should be kept in one place and made available to customer support customers. In this case, we used Confluence as a product for working with a knowledge base and a place for technical documentation of the IT department.
Result
Thus, during the implementation of the project, process by process, the bank switched from the obsolete HP Service Desk 4.5, released in 2002, to a modern, supported system from the Atlassian product suite. ITIL processes were improved and reorganized taking into account the complexity of the banking structure. This gave the customer several important improvements:
- An audit of business processes was carried out to work with user requests and within the bank;
- Received transparent SLA, which can be tracked and used to improve departments;
- Areas of responsibility have been divided into explicit lines of support and the burden on the department as a whole has been reduced. Instead of processing each request along a straight chain “zero-first-second-third lines”, now some of the requests are automatically distributed to the required lines;
- Accelerated reaction times and problem solving times.