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Services Structure


chrisnutt

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Hi All,

I'm curious about how people are structuring their services? I want/need to review and revise ours and I have a few ideas but I thought it might be worth seeing what others are doing. Attached is what we have currently on the Service Portal. As you can see... it's a little busy! Some of the names - while seeming great at the time of inception - are also not very user-friendly. We are suffering from introducing lots of different business areas as services as well. Unless we do something, this is only going to get worse! Any and all comments and criticisms on ours are welcome!

I've considered condensing everything into one or two IT Service(s) but then I fear we'll lose reporting and SLA functionality among other things

One thing that I'd like to raise with Hornbill themselves, I find the Service Category drop-down menu on the Service Portal is not widely used. People just don't seem to a) see it or b) understand what it is for. I was wondering if there is any internal chatter about rethinking that? Possibly giving us a couple of different ways to implement it? Personally, I would find it extremely useful to have those categories as top-level icons - like services are currently - which then allow the user to click through to all the services in that category.

If my current form is anything to go by, I'll be told that we can already do that - I certainly hope so!

Thanks

Chris

Hornbill Service Portal.png

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Hi Chris,

I was holding off responding to see if there were recommendations from someone outside of Hornbill as I thought it would be good to hear with others have to say.

There are a few options that may help which are in place now, but we are also working on more features that will allow you to separate out some of the different areas where services might be provided.

I personally find that the description text adds a lot of noise to this view.  You can turn off things like showing the description or the More option which can clean up this view quite a bit.  These are the settings that are currently available...

image.png

 

One can also review the current services in the catalog and determine if they could be moved under another service as a Request Catalog Item. 

We do have a change in our backlog to provide something similar to what you have mentioned where you are asking if the categories can be displayed as "top level icons".  There is some on-going work in this area that we are looking to complete which may also provide some of the organizing of the categories or different business areas that services can be provided.

I hope that some of this helps and there is always interest in hearing from other customers about how they organize their Service Catalog.

Regards,

James

 

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Guest Paul Alexander

Hi

I just thought I'd put my tuppence worth on this topic as getting Services 'right' is something we're also struggling with!

Much like @chrisnuttsaid, when we initially set Hornbill up it made sense to separate each service according to what functionality was being offered. For instance, we have Services called 'Email', 'Finance', 'Internet and Network Connections' etc which have their own Catalog Items behind them, depending on the specific request required. 

This was done because primarily because a) it made sense at the time and b) it mirrored the previous Portal we had before turning to Hornbill, and it meant that the end users would have a sense of familiarity when we moved them to this new platform. 

However, even at that early stage we encountered some problems. 

For instance, we had a Service called 'Applications and Software' which was used (obviously) to report faults and requests with or about software. We also had a Service called 'Procurement' which would be used when items needed to be procured. We then had to decide where a Catalog Item would be put if someone wanted to procure some software?!  One difficulty was the fact that each of these Services had a different SLA (based on the Priority of the service). Procurement was a Tier 3 service (as it wasn't particularly high profile), but, depending on which particular Software a fault had been reported against (using the Software service), some requests should be logged as a higher priority than others. 

This led us to create new services for high profile Software categories (Finance and CAFM, for instance) which would then  have a higher priority due to the importance of these particular items. Obviously this then means that the number of Services very quickly escalated. And this is how it looks now....

image.thumb.png.ed088ef1fe63f13baca4054a826d6417.png

 

Although the end users are getting slightly better at searching for the right Catalog Item, which aren't necessarily in the most obvious place (for instance, if someone wants to log a  fault with the finance application, should they go to Applications and Software, COINS and iPortal, or the Report a fault with Software service?!) . This then causes a problem where, if they can't find exactly what they're looking for, they'll either plumb for the 'closest match' or they'll email or phone in - which is something we're trying to get away from. 

 

Added to this is the fact that we're now bringing more teams in to Hornbill (HR, Finance, Fleet, Training and H&S so far) all of which need their own Services and Catalog Items. These all need their own SLA's and for some, the data needs to be separate and not visible to other teams (particularly the HR Services).

We too have started looking at the Service Category options and we think that, if the Portal could make this distinction a little more obvious and usable, it would definitely help to make things more user-friendly. 

So, really, I'm not going to be any help here at all......all I'm saying is that you're not alone in saying that things can and do get very unwieldy very quickly, and it's especially difficult to retrospectively go back and change things which were set in place when  we initially set things up. Also, we agree that making the Service Category options more visible and maybe even a default view on the Portal would probably help a lot. 

We also think that the option of being able to change the Service of a request after it's logged would help us because it would mean that if (for instance) someone did log a software fault, but the software turns out to be the Finance software, we could then change the Service that the request is logged under and, hence, change the SLA. 

It's definitely a minefield.....and one which I don't think is easy to overcome! Nice to know we're not alone though........;)

 

 

 

 

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3 hours ago, Paul Alexander said:

It's definitely a minefield.....and one which I don't think is easy to overcome! Nice to know we're not alone though........;)

 

 

 

 

@Paul Alexander Ditto! Thanks for this.

@James Ainsworth, thanks for the feedback. It's good to know that there is something in the works. Could you keep us updated?

Chris

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