About the organization
The multi-national corporation is a global creative production and marketing agency that helps the world's biggest brands, including Unilever, Calvin Klein, and Heineken, get their message out through bold ideas and powerful content.
It is headquartered in London, with regional headquarters in New York and Singapore and operations worldwide in Europe, Asia, and Australia.
How did it operate its IT?
The service environment is consolidated into four regions: India, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), Asia-Pacific (APAC), and the Americas. Despite having a global footprint, the IT team manages operations from India and supports its mostly remote employees across continents.
The IT team sought to tackle two major challenges: Simplifying administration over the request fulfillment and change enablement process and streamlining their HR service delivery.
To overcome these challenges, they sought an ITSM platform that was easy to customize and did not require a unique skillset to configure and maintain.
Challenges with ServiceNow
The marketing agency couldn't derive the most value out of its ServiceNow installation. Its ITSM team had to expend considerable resources to maintain and configure any new process in ServiceNow. The IT team also found it tricky to navigate within the platform and trickier to customize the UI to their preferences.
These platform governance challenges snowballed into hefty expenditures, including the need for dedicated ServiceNow resources. Atop the already steep licensing and implementation fee, the agency realized that the ServiceNow platform would not be sustainable for the company in the long run.
The search for a new ITSM platform
The marketing agency's IT team required a platform with advanced service management capabilities and a short learning curve. Its leadership required IT technicians to be able to use, configure, and manage the platform without constantly searching for help documentation.
The agency was looking for an ITSM platform that would effectively replace ServiceNow by not just replicating the functions, but also optimizing the overhead required to administer its ITSM processes. Additionally, its ServiceNow implementation took six months, and there were concerns from the IT leadership on whether a new platform could stick within this timeline.
After careful consideration and evaluating other alternatives, such as Jira Service Management, ManageEngine's flagship IT and business service management platform ServiceDesk Plus ticked all the right boxes for the agency's requirements.
ServiceDesk Plus stood out for its ease-of-use and high capability to execute the agency's service strategy effectively. Then there was the short runway to value—ServiceDesk Plus was implemented to fit in to the existing service processes in just 10 weeks!
Adding simplicity to the new employee onboarding process
The IT service desk handled over 300 tickets a day, with 150 service desk technicians working across various time zones. With ServiceDesk Plus, they set up a service catalog, making it easy for the employees to find and initiate requests.
One of the key service management processes is to efficiently onboard new employees. The IT team leveraged Form Rules, the service templates and the no-code, form-based automation of ServiceDesk Plus, to un-complicate the process.
Form Rules helped capture detailed information of different work model requirements and employee preferences in just a short form that could be viewed with a single scroll. For instance, depending on the role chosen for the new employee, the assets and the software drop-down field would dynamically list only the relevant choices.
Consolidating change processes with Change Workflows
The IT operations team handled the performance of several internal applications. Each application had a delegated owner who would be notified of any service upgrade, maintenance, or disruption. The IT team had mapped out distinct processes for each type of change implemented in the infrastructure.
The Change Workflows in ServiceDesk Plus helped translate their change process from paper to practice. The IT team had configured over 30 workflows for pre-approved standard changes, and one workflow each for a normal change and an emergency change.
The Change Workflows have several types of Action Nodes to perform actions, such as automating approvals, sending out notifications, or executing low-code scripts. The Change Workflows also offer Branch Nodes to fork and join the workflows, thereby accommodating multiple process variations within a single workflow.
Using the action and branch nodes, the IT team was able to notify the different service owners depending on the application involved in the change process. Once the approval was sought, the Change Workflow would drive the process to the next stage for the change.
Leveraging the ManageEngine suite to underpin service processes
The IT team now relies on ManageEngine's vast ecosystem of products to supplement the ITSM processes handled by ServiceDesk Plus.
For instance, they leveraged ManageEngine ADManager Plus to help with the employee onboarding and offboarding process. When integrated with ServiceDesk Plus, ADManager Plus helps in creating, deleting, and disabling an account in the organization's Active Directory, right from the ticket workspace, saving technicians the effort of toggling between multiple apps.
They also utilized ManageEngine AlarmsOne, an IT alert management tool, to automatically raise incident tickets for anomalies its IT infrastructure in ServiceDesk Plus. Since the Network Operations team uses SolarWinds to monitor its network devices and server utilization, the team wanted to be able to notify the IT service desk when an alert was raised in SolarWinds.
However, the IT team had a unique logical requirement regarding the creation of tickets in ServiceDesk Plus based on alerts from SolarWinds. Any network entity that experienced an outage would have a ticket raised on its behalf in ServiceDesk Plus. However, when an entity underwent a performance fluctuation, child tickets would have to be created for every subsequent fluctuation.
Despite the logic complexity, the platform capabilities of ServiceDesk Plus helped the IT team to achieve this capability. With a custom function scripted in the low code IDE within ServiceDesk Plus, the agency was able to group the requests from a single entity in a particular timeframe. Now, once the entity is up, the parent incident ticket is automatically closed.
The range of integrations with ServiceDesk Plus for enterprise-wide processes.
The agency's IT team also integrated ServiceDesk Plus with Jira, using Zoho Flow, the integration platform as a service (iPaaS) offering from ManageEngine's parent company, Zoho Corp. Their HR and Finance departments use Jira to manage their tickets. With enterprise processes generally spanning multiple departments, the IT team wanted a service workflow that could connect them with HR and Finance.
Once ServiceDesk Plus was integrated with Jira using Zoho Flow, IT, HR, and Finance were able to track the request tickets automatically for their respective service workflows. For instance, when the IT team is requested for a service that involves HR, such as a user deletion, the IT technician can simply choose the HR support group in the request template from ServiceDesk Plus.
This selection activates Zoho Flow, which creates a ticket in the HR instance of Jira, with the ticket details, status, and the ticket ID from ServiceDesk Plus. Similarly, any tickets created in Jira reflect in ServiceDesk Plus, with the details, status, and ticket ID for both the HR and Finance departments. Between the HR and Finance departments and the IT team, the IT team configured 14 service workflows.
Finally, the IT team opted for Zoho Assist, a remote support tool, to reach out to their global workforce with help for any productivity disruptions. Once ServiceDesk Plus was connected with Zoho Assist, the IT technicians could initiate secure remote sessions with their employees directly from the ticket workspace.
Finding success with ServiceDesk Plus
With ServiceDesk Plus, the global marketing and creative production agency was able to optimize its IT costs without compromising on productivity. ServiceDesk Plus offered a viable, user-friendly, and a customizable platform that fit into their unique requirements, without requiring additional expertise or consultation.
Further, with the vast ecosystem of ManageEngine solutions for every facet of IT management, the agency was able to bolster its service operations with proactive alerts and intelligent tools.