Forgive me if my prose are not as sharp as they might be, but it has “reindeer” for about two weeks straight and that has dampened my whit a little, but as many of you will “noel” from my previous updates we agreed at the May 2019 GMM that it was close to the right time to put our long standing Service Desk toolset (Footprints) out to grass over the coming year. So work started to find a suitable replacement and get approval from The Board (a challenge not to be underestimated). At this point this was just another project.
First, a few facts about the outgoing system Footprints…
- We used it for over nine years with the industry average being four
- In that time it was used 24/7/365
- It was used to manage almost 20,000 customer assets
- During its life it supported up to six different services and over 3000 seats
- It was used to manage over 400,000 service issues
The chosen solution – Remedyforce
So it was that negotiation started with the chosen supplier (BMC) for the purchase of their market leading Toolset “Helix Remedyforce” and (as anyone who has tried to get me to buy a round knows) the guy doing the selling was not in for an easy ride. Fast forward to Christmas Eve at 17:23 (no joke) and the deal was done.
A project plan to roll out Remedyforce over the next four months was outlined and on the second week of January work began. On the third week of January work stopped with the “specialist consultants” who had been lined up to help us with our transition, proving to be a complete bunch of turkeys.
So we get back on track using a different and excellent consultant organisation and in particular a guy called Paul Donders. By the end of Feb 2020 things are starting to take shape.
Ok, so you’ll all know well what was around the corner and the impact it has had on everything is well documented. As a result and for so many reasons (from low pax and flight numbers meaning testing was stop start at best, to trying to get integration working with a customer whose “integration team” seemed to be out of office) we get to August and we were still “rolling out”.
The weeks, not days, of effort to get where we wanted to be in the face of what was (or was not) going on around us meant it would have been oh oh oh so easy to lose sight of the prize and not be driven by a need to be as fighting fit as possible once this terrible chapter in world history is behind us. But (and this is a banker) this is ServiceTec, and the way that the project team (they know who they are) stuck to the task resulting in us going live serving not just all three airports in RoW (AMS, LHR and OSL), but also a new customer in the U.S. (Salt Lake City) with brand new ITSM is not far short of a Miracle on 34th Street.
Remedyforce Screenshot – Incident Dashboard 
How did we do it?
Well alongside the project stakeholder group who contributed at every turn to ensure the best outcome, a project like this presents many “how to” challenges. So myself and three others undertook to become administrators of the Remedyforce product, with the intention of ensuring a level of independence similar to that we enjoyed for the most part with Footprints. Those three others are Vixen, Prancer – sorry not sure what just happened – Nicole Simpson, Graham Hey and Patrick Barrett (I almost said on behalf of the U.S. but that would have done the whole group a disservice).
Of course SLC did get to benefit from a head start as a lot of ground work had been done already for the RoW sites, but the way this team are working together through dozens of show and tell and knowledge share sessions and the resultant level and speed of advancement in our capability in this most important role is, I for one would say, definitely making the effort most worthwhile.
What all this effort means is we now have an increasingly feature rich ITSM toolset which incorporates all of the best of Footprints, along with added functionality such as the use of a Barcode scanning app for floor walking tickets and PMs, Self-Service via a portal with customer satisfaction surveys and the ability for a single asset number to determine assignment and Service Levels, all supported by an increasingly capable internal team.
Season’s greetings to you all!
Carl Shallcross
Director of Strategic Innovation
