A large metropolitan County in California comprises 43 departments, and each department relies heavily upon the Information Systems Department to support its needs. In a concerted effort to reduce the costs of IT and to reorganize its internal IT department as a service-oriented business rather than a traditional cost center, management built a five year plan to implement better IT Service Management guidelines across the organization.

This County already had an IT Service Management tool and process in place; however, over many years and modifications of these processes, they were no longer aligned with some of the guidelines that ITIL provided. Therefore, the management driving this initiative was looking to better align their processes with ITIL v3 and effectuate a more holistic approach to continuous improvements with the creation of a new IT Service Management Department and new Process Owners.

Assessment

The County appointed several resource teams to manage the tasks of assessing and building a solution. They, in turn, assembled a cross-organization team that included SmallCart Systems to further assess the County’s current needs and problems.

The County had recently upgraded its IT Service Management Tool to HP ServiceCenter 6.2 from Peregrine ServiceCenter 5.x. During the upgrade process, system administrator simply copied the helpdesk forms (screens) of the previous version, despite the changes HP had made regarding the out of the box forms. The management’s original assessment was to quickly deploy the tool with as little training of the helpdesk as possible.

Unfortunately, in doing so, the County’s helpdesk reinforced many bad habits such as recording all “quick fix” incidents as service calls and only moving a ticket to an incident if it needed the outside help of a higher tier of support (i.e. Field Services, Network Teams, or Desktop Engineering). The helpdesk was also not recording a number of key attributes when the helpdesk analysts were assisting end-users with their initial calls.

The solution derived from the comprehensive assessment was to establish a new process roadmap for the Incident Management and Problem Management aspects of the County’s ITSM Process plan. The County would continue with the existing version of HP ServiceCenter 6.2; however, the project team would revisit the implementation and rebuild the solution according to the new ITIL v3 based solution.

Implementation

SmallCart Systems provided one of its senior level technical consultants to assist in the design effort of the Service Level Management modifications for the new telecommunications equipment manufacturer. SmallCart worked with the County in gathering requirements for the initial design and modifications needed to customize the HP ServiceCenter forms in the Service Interaction, Incident Management, and Problem Management Modules.

To do this assessment, the SmallCart Consultant used a series of spreadsheets that defined all of the out-of the-box database fields and another spreadsheet of the current database fields. In this process, the County’s helpdesk manager would identify what the current database field was used for and subsequently had to justify its value and necessity in the new implementation. This process involved reviewing not just the custom fields but also the out-of-box fields such as Telephone Number and Email Address.

Next, the process then proceeded to an interactive set of workshops where the team would display screen printouts of the before and the out-of-box fields. As the County Stakeholders suggested placement of the fields, the SmallCart Consultant would drag and drop the placement in a live development environment of HP ServiceCenter. Once the workshop was completed, several screen shots were taken of the prototype and were given to management and stakeholder users for review. Additionally, the helpdesk users themselves provided feedback as to placement—where they would logically anticipate the field. SmallCart then went into the development phase of the project and built out a solution for the County, specifically for the County’s ServiceCenter Administration Team.

Results

The project’s success was built mainly on the interactive workshops that the team developed and used in the requirements gathering process. In several instances, SmallCart identified better ways to manage data such as encouraging the County to make use of out-of-box fields where appropriate and to create custom fields rather than misusing fields to store data. The SmallCart Consultant also encouraged the use of existing out-of-the-box tables to be utilized relationally rather than attempting to store all of the data in one single table that could not be rationalized.

The project concluded with a knowledge transfer of the development team and the existing County ServiceCenter Administrators. One of the key assets delivered in this training consisted of a step-by-step guide that showed the administrators how to recreate the implementation on an out-of-box ServiceCenter instance. This proved to be useful when the team planned on deploying the solution into the production environment.