SysAid ITSM for BBAM

The challenges of rapid growth As BBAM has experienced rapid and massive growth as a corporation, the demands on the company’s IT support team have seen a commensurate increase. The processes the IT department was using for service and asset management, for troubleshooting ticket management, and for employee onboarding and access provisioning were disjointed and very manual. BBAM was dependent on email, Excel spreadsheets, and manual uploading of forms for all its IT services.
For asset management, even the number of hardware assets could not be known without physical observation. Naturally, with offices all over the world and a limited IT staff, this made change control an especially daunting challenge.
The result was a complex series of separate, siloed elements in workflows involving multiple departments, which was extremely inefficient and time-consuming. The decentralization made it difficult to search the audit trails required for certain control processes, which meant that providing needed audit information was time-consuming and not easily repeatable.
Another weakness in the decentralized processes the IT department depended on was evident in reporting and analytics. All key metrics in the IT department had to be manually compiled for reporting to the leadership team, which took a relatively long time and lacked insights on trends or patterns that might assist with capacity planning (when and why there are spikes in tickets, etc.).

A vendor of digital transformation
Seeking to scale and to build infrastructure to support BBAM’s growth, the IT team decided to embark on a back- office digital transformation journey. They determined that a comprehensive service management solution would best meet its needs. Primarily, they sought to:

• Automate service desk ticketing, problem management, change management, and release management

• Centralize and improve asset tracking and management

• Enable more self-service to ease pressure on the service desk

• Build a common knowledge base for end users and the IT service staff

The vendor discovery process began in May 2018. According to Teresa Eng, Senior Business Technology Analyst at BBAM, SysAid stood out from the competition in both product capabilities and customer support. The solution’s customization and automation capabilities uniquely met the company’s needs, while the assistance and follow- through of the SysAid Professional Services team and Account Managers made taking advantage of those capabilities as easy as possible.

People, process, and technology The IT department decided it would begin promoting a digital culture shift by implementing the SysAid solution for a range of common service management activities:

• Service desk support ticketing

• Personnel offboarding (comprehensive de-provisioning cycle)

• The self-service portal

• Knowledge base

• New hire onboarding (comprehensive provisioning cycle)

• Asset recording, management, retirement lifecycles

• Advanced Reporting

“This project was truly the embodiment of people, process, and technology coming together for this digital transformation.”- Teresa Eng, Senior Business Technology Analyst
To encourage a transition to the self-service portal, the IT team held multiple meetings and role-specific scenario- based training, including the use of templates designed for onboarding. Team sites were created to centralize access to all key informational materials, such as instructional videos from SysAid, process flows, and knowledge base links (allowing effective self-service search).
Overall, it took about a month for all employees to be fully trained. The self-service portal and deployment of the templates provided common ground for user adoption, as the portal is the primary method for submitting tickets.

Streamlining new hire onboarding and employee offboarding
For new hire onboarding and offboarding, SysAid workflows incorporate all credentialing, asset and access provisioning processes, as well as including the relevant managers and HR personnel as needed. This helps to get new hires onboarded quicker and productive from day one. Throughout these processes, all required audit trails are tracked and recorded in SysAid, to ensure full compliance. Asset management
BBAM’s asset management lifecycle is fully managed in SysAid, with both tracking and customizations to manage assets in different locations at any point in time. Knowledge base
SysAid has allowed BBAM to build up a knowledge base to cross-train employees. The knowledge base is open to uploading media and documentation by authorized stakeholders in predefined categories, making independent learning and coaching easier and faster. Customized reports
With SysAid’s flexible reporting capabilities, the IT department is able to produce monthly customized reports on:

• Changes to assets used by the company

• Ticket volumes, indicating how many were opened and where they stand, divided by category

• New hires, divided by department

These reports centralize frequently needed  information for easy access, use and review, as well as providing BBAM new insights into aspects of IT performance.
Communication is key
The BBAM team sees SysAid adoption as dependent on building relationships within the company, listening to personnel in the field and learning what their needs are. To this end, the
IT team send out surveys to gather employee feedback and collect data regarding potential future improvements.
And as suggestions for further streamlining come in from end-users, the IT team leverages SysAid’s flexibility to tweak workflows accordingly.
The results are felt across the board
SysAid went live in October 2018, with the impact rapidly felt across the entire business.
As of 2019, about one quarter of the tickets handled by BBAM’s service desk are for application support, 45% are for desktop support, and the remaining third are for personnel support (e.g., onboarding, offboarding). The process of onboarding has also seen dramatic changes, with the process originally taking up to one month – with a lot of in-house communications and manual steps – to a total of just one or two days.
Teresa said that SysAid has made BBAM’s service management far more efficient, calling the solution “a gamechanger.”
The impact of SysAid among end users includes greater visibility into the progress of IT support and resolution processes, more communication with peers and IT teams, and improved engagement with knowledge base content (organized by issue and incident).
Teresa believes the use of SysAid will continue to pay dividends across the organization, making an even greater impact as BBAM embarks on future growth.
‘Going digital is not the end of a journey, but the beginning’
In the near term, the company will be focusing on greater system integration, more process automations, and additional customized reporting. Looking a little further down the road, BBAM IT leadership will also be examining the potential of SysAid’s BI Analytics module to provide a comprehensive overview of the department’s performance, identify trends, and enable more accurate decision-making.
“We certainly look forward to continue to enhance and build a more robust service management solution for years to come!” concluded Teresa.