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Change Management>>
Progressing from reaction to unanticipated change to full change managment through a series of selected initiatives.

IT Support Development>>
Achieving best practices without disrupting day-to-day support levels by carefully managing service upgrades.

Service Management Roadmap>>
Delivering high service levels utilizing existing tools and resources and through selected development of new processes.

Service Management Implementation>>
Bringing organizations to a high level of change and service management through the highly successful ITIL® framework.

Service Desk Implementation>>
Extensive experience in Service Desk assessment, roadmap creation, and implementation.

Environment

The client, a Fortune 500 financial services company, relies heavily on technology to automate a majority of the core financial functions.  The IT department consists of 1200+ technical staff developing and supporting over 1400 applications across hundreds of varying server platforms deployed to over ten thousand desktops worldwide.  Unplanned systems downtime has a significant impact on the productivity of the company and the capability to execute standard business functions. 

The objective of the implementation was to streamline the amount of work required to maintain production system health.  This primarily involved change management, service management, and configuration management solutions.

Implementation Components

Change Management: Change Control Committee

     Business Problems     Initiative Summary
  • Production outages due to unknown changes
  • Long outage resolution times due to misguided troubleshooting
  • Separate, conflicting production changes
  • Limited tracking of system change history
  • Technical staff not accountable for alterations to production systems
  1. Defined function and structure of the Change Control members
  2. Modified existing tracking system to mimic future Remedy functions
  3. Implemented processes to review and coordinate all production changes each week
  4. Implemented Remedy solution once processes and organization were adopted
  5. Developed key metrics to determine effectiveness of change control

Change Management: Release Management Process

     Business Problems     Initiative Summary
  • Unconfirmed completion of development tasks
  • Non-standard software distribution and installation processes
  • Undocumented maintenance/support procedures
  • No owner of release management and control
  • Non-standard training of support staff and end-users per release   
  1. Performed gap analysis on existing release management processes
  2. Documented production migration requirements for all teams
  3. Integrated new processes with existing PMO organization
  4. Mandated all application migrations perform deployment review
  5. Defined requirements for overall Release Manager role
  6. Integrated processes with Change Control committee

Service Desk: Remedy Implementation

     Business Problems     Initiative Summary
  • Various systems for tracking incidents
  • Non-standard process for issue escalation
  • Limited metrics on support performance
  • No integration with planned changes
  • Undefined support tiers within organization
  1. Performed gap analysis of all support applications
  2. Designed Remedy module to accommodate client requirements
  3. Defined and communicated proper tiered support organization
  4. Developed standard incident management processes
  5. Migrated internal help desk initially and subsequent tiers as requested
  6. Developed standard management reports of key metrics

Configuration Management: Hardware and Software Repository

     Business Problems     Initiative Summary
  • No repository of technical hardware assets
  • Limited database of approved desktop software
  • No tracking of assets and associated incidents
  • Limited availability of real time asset data
  • No financial tracking capability for hardware asset lifecycle
  • Non-standard training of support staff and end-users per release
  1. Define vision of Configuration Management DB for all assets
  2. Researched existing platform management tools (e.g. LANDesk)
  3. Defined and built custom Remedy module for software assets
  4. Define standard processes for maintaining CMDB data
  5. Developed routine reports from hardware resellers for hardware data
  6. Customized Remedy module for desktops, laptops, servers, PDA’s, monitors, and printers lifecycle tracking with routine data updates
  7. Developed custom reports for lifecycle tracking and maintenance