Remedyforce implementation best practice: Walk a mile in your customer's shoes
By Mark Hodge, Senior Consultant, Cloudaction
I work with many customers who are looking to accomplish similar objectives. That is, to efficiently manage their IT resources and technology. Being a consultant with Cloudaction gives me the ability to teach my customers Remedyforce implementation best practices and ways to manage these cloud-based technologies. I went through a lot of what my customers do when I ran an international service desk. I was tasked to find a tool that could scale as our company grew and expanded. We needed a tool that was easy to configure and followed industry standards. The tool also had to be agile enough to allow for changes as business needs changed.
I settled on Remedyforce. I had to prove to my leadership why I selected this tool. What was that old ROI. Here are some of the factors in my decision making.
- No software or infrastructure needed.
- No high priced resources needed to manage changes.
- Agile enough to move to production in a short amount of time.
- Fixed costs.
- Ease of training for my staff users and client users.
- Real time reporting and dashboards to track KPI’s immediately.
Besides that we were becoming more ITIL-centric and we needed to cash in on this training as we matured. So it was important to me to have a tool that had these tool sets built in:
- Problem Management
- Service Catalog Management
- Request Fulfillment
- Release & Deployment Management
- Service Asset & Configuration Management
- Knowledge Management
- Service Level Management
- Incident Management
- Change Management
We had some of these processes in place but it was very convoluted. Some were in SharePoint, some in bug trackers. The point is there was no flow and it took a lot of extra time to manage the redundancy.
The beauty of having the different modules in Remedyforce is that you can begin with Incident Management and Request Fulfillment and once your team and customers are comfortable with that then transition to additional modules such as Problem and Change when you’re ready to integrate; the hooks are already built in.
Another important factor is how often the tool is upgraded to add additional features and bug fixes. Remedyforce does three releases a year and takes great consideration on listening to customer requests.
I have done over 15 engagements in the past year and I learn something new each and every time I work with a customer. I try to walk in their shoes.