Hi. My name is Michele McFadden and I am the Director of Product Management for the IT service management solutions, including Numara® FootPrints® and Numara Track-It®,! at Numara® Software.  I’ve been working with our customers around the world and product development for about 10 years. My team and I  work with customers, sales, marketing, development and prospects to gather and prioritize requirements and define product vision to provide the best customer experience for service management.

Service Management Product Management Team Blog:

Inside Service Management – Where the Numara Software Product ManagementTeam shares insights  into the product management process for Numara FootPrints  and  Numara Track-It! , what we’ve learned from our customers, and our thoughts on the IT Service Management industry.

The “Use What You Have” Consolidated Service Desk

Welcome to our first blog entry! My team and I are excited to share our insights into the product management process here at Numara Software with you. Our chief goal as product managers is to understand our customers’ needs and translate them into better products. Over the coming months we’ll discuss our product planning process, what we’ve learned from our customers, our thoughts on the pragmatic and practical approach to ITIL® service lifecycle management, and much more.

One of the clearest messages we are hearing from our customers and prospects is that they are looking for value in their service management tools and processes. Now more than ever, we are faced with having to do more with less, both as individuals and as organizations. Whether it’s a family taking a relaxing “staycation” at home this summer, or an organization auditing their tool licenses to see what is really being used, the mantra of the day is to “use what you have”.  So how does that translate into service management?

Most organizations have an IT service desk tool for tracking incidents, problems and service requests from their employees. But can a service desk tool be repurposed to track the same kinds of requests for other departments? The ITIL® (IT Infrastructure Library) set of best practices for IT Service Management defines a service desk as the single point of contact for all IT-related requests. The same benefits of a service desk for  IT – centralization, automation, self-service, reporting – could be applied to lots of other departments that receive requests: Human Resources, Compliance, Customer Complaints, Training, Facilities Management, etc.

Here at Numara Software, we have the good fortune to work with thousands of customers who are amazingly creative in configuring their service desk products. Both of our flagship service desk solutions, Numara ®FootPrints® and Numara® Track-It!® ,   offer the opportunity to track different types of requests: Numara FootPrints through the "project" concept – discreet workspaces for different functions that all tie together, and Numara Track-It! with easy customization of the category fields and security policies. We have everything from biomedical companies using our products to track clinical engineering projects to townships tracking parking permits. Here’s a video case study from one of our ingenious customers on his creative uses of Numara FootPrints throughout the organization.

There are obvious benefits to using one tool for multiple purposes. The IT department typically has to evaluate products for different departments on a regular basis. By recommending a tool that’s already in-house, the organization can save time, effort and the cost of evaluation, implementation, additional hardware, etc.  And by sharing the same tool, it’s easy to automate workflow between related processes and get consolidated reporting.  Over on ITSMWatch.com, George Spafford recently published an article on this topic with more detail on the benefits of a "shared services desk" and tips for success.

Of course, if the tool is too hard to configure, then IT becomes the "configurer" (and potential bottleneck) for every new implementation. But if business managers can be empowered to manage their own process with minimal training and no programming, then the burden on IT is reduced, allowing them to focus on maintaining the infrastructure that keeps the business humming.

Not every process lends itself to automation with a flexible service desk tool.  Sometimes purpose-built tools are a better fit, and offer a substantial enough increase to productivity to make them worth the investment. What many of our “power” customers do is to automate a few high visibility processes for different areas of the business, and then allow other departments to request a new project when a need arises. Often they find if they can automate at least 80% of what was once a manual or multi-step process without custom programming , then the implementation has a high chance of success.

Have you had success with a consolidated service desk? Do you have other ideas for doing more with less in IT? Suggestions for future blog topics? We’d love to hear from you! You can use the “Comments Section” below, or email me at michele.mcfadden@numarasoftware.com.