You hear a lot about “time to value” these days, but what does that really mean? With a SaaS service desk solution, do you truly get value the moment it’s provisioned and you can log in? Is being able to log in really all you need? We at BMC believe that “value” means that you’re using our service live and in production to achieve your business objectives. With that in mind, here are the top three things you should be looking for when you are planning your value roadmap for ITSM.
Better than Best Practices (B)
Every vendor you speak with has some version of “best practices” that they claim are built into their ITSM solution, but you may need more than what some developer believes is “best.” Ideally, you’ll be able to take advantage of the experiences and proven practices of real organizations like yours to apply working configurations, process flows and adoption strategies to accelerate your own initiative. You want the best of the best – from the customers – not some R&D shop. Make sure the source of the proposed “best practices” are real life situations and that those configurations are ready to go out of the box with minimal effort on your part to adopt. This will help you get started faster, and be happier with your outcome.
Tailored Technology (T)
There is a fine line between “out of the box” and fully customized solutions, and choosing SaaS doesn’t mean you can’t find a perfect balance somewhere in the middle. That perfect fit is a “tailored” one, but tailoring means spending a little time to ensure that your tool configuration maps to your organizational structure and process, so that you can work the way you need to. It’s important for your service provider to be a trusted partner whose priority is helping to drive your business, not increasing your complexity to drive their services revenue. They need to leverage the capabilities of the ITSM solution (and any OOTB content) and be willing to take a nip or a tuck here and there to create a perfect fit that is not off the rack, but not over-engineered or unnecessarily complicated.
Savvy Staff (S)
Finally, you need to make sure your team is ready to hit the ground running. That means you have a fully educated administrator who is capable of taking ownership of your solution, so you can be self-reliant for the long term. You should be asking for recommendations on training for administrators and users; a truly great provider who is invested in your success will offer these as part of the service.
Ultimately it’s a simple equation: B + T + S = V (value)
This may seem like a lot to tackle, but with BMC Remedyforce we’ve found ways to streamline your onboarding experience so that you’re at the point of real value MUCH faster than you might expect – in weeks, not months.
How are we able to do this? At BMC, we have a dedicated team whose only responsibility is to accelerate your time to value and satisfaction with BMC Remedyforce. Unlike consulting firms who are incentivized to maximize project hours, BMC Remedyforce Onboarding Services work with the BMC Remedyforce product team to produce content based on best practices gleaned from hundreds of customer implementations, so it can be built into the Remedyforce solution. This means you can adopt the “best of” configurations that work for about 80% of customers without any manual effort. “Smart Practices” content can be enabled directly within the Remedyforce administrative UI, which significantly reduces the effort for consultants to configure your Remedyforce org.
BMC Remedyforce Onboarding also leverages an agile-based project methodology to speed your time to configured, tested and usable Remedyforce. Using this approach, we’ve seen customers go from zero to live in production use within just a couple of weeks. That INCLUDES training, strategy and design, configuration in both sandbox and production environments, testing and support for the go-live event. It’s a comprehensive service, but not an expensive one. In fact, our goal is to reduce the amount of time to go-live for our customers by as much as 75% over the next few months – while increasing customer satisfaction levels (which are already through the roof!).
If you’re trying to decide between a one-day “get started” service and a 12 month behemoth project, ask yourself which is likely to lead to real adoption and value. You should be able to answer these questions:
- What is included in the implementation?
- Will your administrators get training, or will they be on their own, stuck in long support queues when they get lost?
- Can you get hands-on with the technology to test configurations and validate that they’ll work for you, or will you be given a generic configuration that doesn’t fit your needs?
- Are they offering you value or just a shiny object to distract you from the realistic effort you need to undergo to achieve a return on your investment?
