Overview
Our client, one of the leading animation studios in the world, had utilized a system for years that they developed in-house to manage incoming work requests. Over time, they started to see issues arise with the functionality and integration of their platforms, such as unsatisfactory user experience, lack of customization, and the inability to automate repetitive tasks. In this particular case, the onboarding and offboarding processes became problematic and subsequently left their IT team members to manually create several tasks within their system each time an employee either joined or left the company.
THE CHALLENGE
The transition from one tool to another presents a tremendous challenge for any organization, regardless of size or level of experience. Our client displayed many of the characteristics you'll often see when adopting a new system, such as doubt, confusion, complex process mapping, unclear dependencies, and fear of the unknown.
After extensive calls, demonstrations, follow-ups, and validations with our client, we decided that an accelerated ITSM implementation would be the best solution for their business requirements. This involved leveraging our process expertise and profound technical knowledge to implement Jira Service Management as a portal for IT-related work requests, while also focusing on their needs for the employee onboarding and offboarding processes. We were confident that our experience with industry-standard implementations and established best practices would set our client up for success. The onboarding/offboarding process involved extensive manual work, in addition to a simultaneous overload and lack of available information. Not to mention, the overhead accounted for a large portion of just two people's work.
Additionally, we identified a clear need to connect the different systems they employed to manage all of their IT workloads. The team used PagerDuty for their on-call alerts, and although their in-house system could create the alerts, the tools didn't communicate with each other. Because of this, agents had to switch between the different platforms to handle incidents, which created confusion when communicating to the end-user.
THE SOLUTION
Our goal was to ensure our client had a full-service desk for their users, one that utilized ITSM best practices and that we tailored to meet the needs of the organization. We decided to leverage a trusted Praecipio technology partner, Workato, as a middleware to integrate their new Jira Service Management instance with Slack to create and manage issues, as well as PagerDuty for on-call alerts and Workday to kick off their onboarding and offboarding automation.
Users can now directly access the Jira Service Management portal or create tickets from Slack, where they were already spending most of their time. Agents can even work directly from Slack, commenting or resolving issues using Workato's Workbot, while the underlying Jira issue documents the interaction, tracks SLAs, and moves through its workflow.
For their onboarding and offboarding processes, the Workato middleware integration helped us to pull employee information from Workday (the source of truth for HR) and create a full set of dynamic tasks for IT to complete based on this information.
To simplify the on-call process, we synchronized PagerDuty and Jira so that actions taken in either tool were documented and visible in both platforms. This included the assignment, acknowledgment, and resolution of agent alerts updating in the Jira issue and vice versa. Even though our client worked within three different platforms, agents and end-users had the option to select their favorite and still benefit from the functionality and data captured in all three.
