SITUATION
A vertically integrated, full-service midstream provider of crude-oil and natural-gas logistics, water treatment services, and retail propane was structured to respond quickly to emerging growth options and had expanded considerably through acquisitions in its first several years.
As a rapidly growing firm, the company found the need to consolidate the way it delivers IT services across its organization with offices located throughout the United States. The company was using a variety of tools, including freeware IT systems management and helpdesk applications, at several locations that were not meeting IT needs for managing services. This resulted in inefficiencies and unnecessary hardware and support expenses. The company needed to drive improvement in the areas of incident management, change management, and fulfillment for requests coming into the IT organization.
Harmonizing and consolidating processes called for the implementation of a professional-level system with a more complete suite of services. After an extensive evaluation of ITSM solutions, the company chose ServiceNow.
CHALLENGE
Supplanting an inefficient ITSM solution with a more comprehensive, professional-level solution requires planning and expertise. Organizational change is the first of many obstacles to face.
For this implementation, planning needed to include an intricate review of processes from the old systems to decide which to migrate to ServiceNow, choosing additional tools and services for the initial implementation, and deriving a training plan to bring the staff up to speed on the new software. As a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution, ServiceNow also required support planning to move from the on-site freeware solutions to a cloud-based solution.
The company needed a technology solutions partner to develop and implement a complete project roadmap to address these needs and drive best practices into the solution. AIM Consulting was selected based on its capability in ServiceNow implementations and the deep expertise in IT Service Management to do it right.
SOLUTION
The project was headed by Shawn McCoy, an AIM Principal Consultant specializing in IT Service Management and Quality Excellence with more than 20 years of experience delivering IT solutions and certified in ServiceNow.
A small team, which included a developer also certified in ServiceNow, created the project roadmap and delivered the implementation in less than eight weeks. AIM’s agile approach to technology delivery enabled a very rapid and cost-effective solution, allowing the client company to bring the power of ServiceNow to its end users quickly.
The roadmap began with understanding the needs of the IT organization, which resulted in a very successful implementation of ServiceNow for the company’s incident, change, and request fulfillment processes.
AIM implemented and configured ServiceNow to address adaptations of ITIL processes for the company’s needs while avoiding specific customizations that would only add undue complexity to the project. For example, the company’s change-approval process was configured so that managers would be able to approve and finalize project work, and notification procedures were tailored to ensure that managers and end users are kept informed during incident resolution matters.
RESULT
Approximately 500–600 users across four offices are now enjoying the benefits of ServiceNow. The system is already being leveraged for project management, the Project Office, general computing controls, and auditing functions.
AIM’s expertise in implementing ServiceNow solutions enabled more workflow intelligence and robust reporting capabilities to be built into the solution. Tasks can be sent out to various teams for fulfilling parts of a solution; for example, a single onboard request can drive different tasks across the organization that fulfill an entire order, as opposed to the order being one giant task. Dashboard features and refined home pages proved to be critical assets for project and functional management teams.
Because the solution is cloud-based, the need to host and manage internal infrastructure is negated, as ServiceNow hosts the software in its own datacenters. This provides enormous cost savings for the company, allowing the company to apply resources toward managing and improving ITSM processes.
Over time, AIM’s experience-driven implementation of ServiceNow will allow the company to scale its business without adding more IT headcount, allowing the company to grow and respond to future process needs regardless of its size. As a trusted partner, AIM provided best practices, Agile processes, and the depth of knowledge to provide a world-class ServiceNow implementation.
