The Challenge
A U.S. state’s IT department was initially utilizing a previous installation of ServiceNow IT Service Management to maintain their internal IT services. However, they were concerned that their users were not adopting the Service Portal and many felt uncomfortable navigating it. As a result, increasing ease of use of their Service Portal to encourage participation became one of the client’s primary goals.
Additionally, they wanted to expand their existing ServiceNow instance to improve the overall functionality and effectiveness of their Service Portal. This included the incorporation of Virtual Agent and Live Agent, as well as a fully functional Knowledge Base that they could maintain in order to manage, review, and approve articles, and link users to the new Service Portal. The improved solution also needed to have workflows, processes, and catalog items created within ServiceNow for a variety of categories, including telecommunications, VPN access, and Office 365.
The Solution
The GlideFast team proposed a completely new design for the State’s IT Department’s ServiceNow Service Portal, using an in-depth understanding of the state's brand, pain points, user adoption challenges, and processes. The solution included reorganization of the Portal’s widgets to ensure the most important information and services were within easy reach, coupled with a fully-responsive, more user-friendly appearance that works to counteract user resistance and give the department’s employees a first-class experience they would find efficient and enjoyable.
Adoption Efforts
In order to further assist with user adoption efforts, the GlideFast Team provided the customer with a detailed guide for adoption efforts and activities they could use at every stage of the implementation and even beyond go-live. With this information in hand, the state is fully equipped to ensure user adoption continues to improve, even as jobs change hands and new staff members are brought on board.
Knowledge Base
In order to improve the Knowledge Base, 10 user categories were developed and streamlined to be as relatable as possible, sharing common data fields in order to ensure smooth processing of requests and fulfillment. A process hierarchy model was also proposed for their ServiceNow Knowledge Management application to ensure a clean and easy-to-maintain process for updating published information.
Software Development Life Cycle
The full Software Development Life Cycle was fulfilled within an Agile software development environment using the ServiceNow Agile Development 2.0 application, as well as ServiceNow’s NowCreate based Project Management methodology. This provided the client with additional insight into ServiceNow’s potential project management functionalities, including Project Status tracking, User Acceptance Testing, and quality assurance solutions.
Results
Over the course of three months, GlideFast was able to deploy all expected implementations and functionalities, addressing the client’s concerns and exceeding their expectations.
In terms of user adoption, the updated look and feel of the Service Portal has provided an improved user experience that is expected to help users navigate the tool.
In terms of user adoption, the updated look and feel of the Service Portal has provided an improved user experience that is expected to help users navigate the tool. The U.S State’s IT Department projects that the amount of users successfully using the Service Portal and Request system will increase from 5% to 70% within the first three weeks of implementation. The ITSM solution will now be able to be properly executed with an increase in users submitting incidents and service requests through the platform.
GlideFast was also able to streamline the client’s Knowledge Management processes with the newly implemented process hierarchy model, providing a closer look at task flows within ServiceNow. IT Onboarding workflows were implemented in order to improve automation for new employees being onboarded to the department.
As of today, this customer is aiming to continue their working relationship with GlideFast to build out the functionality of their ServiceNow applications, with a goal of expanding the use of the system outside of their IT department. After learning about the capabilities of Agile 2.0 and ServiceNow’s Project Portfolio Management solution during the software development life cycle, the client is interested in implementing these functionalities for their internal project management practices as well.
