Survey - How do you manage Service Manager?

[davidrb84]

Slightly unusual post for this forum, but I'm interested in how others are approaching management of Service Manager (and/or the other products in the hornbill line-up)
 

I suspect many/most have some fraction of 1 person* doing all support/development including

• PCFs + BPMs (Creation and updates)
• User Management (including role assignment and creation)
• Support (everything from training to diagnosing unexpected behaviours)
• Housekeeping and other management (checking logs, editing templates, managing the portals, etc)

*Probably with some sort of backup person for emergencies

Question

Do you do things this way?

Do you split the duties amongst more than 1 person/team?

Roughly how many BPMS or PCFs do you have (just to get a sense of the scale/complexity of your instance)

[Adrian Simpkins]

Hi David

Currently I do everything in the system from admin through to portal maintenance - no back up for me as such. Some limited admin support comes from some team leaders / managers but this is very limited so basically its just me to do it all. I have requested support but not gone anywhere as yet.

- no coverage when I am on holiday - just some basic support around users not being able to logon to Hornbill

- no team to split anything with currently

- I support around 80 teams across a number of corporate areas, and have at least 120 different catalogue items across 66 services

Many thanks

Adrian

 

[JanS2000]

Morning David

Same as Adrian, it's currently just myself who manages our system with some limited support from a senior colleague when needed. The plan originally, was that we would split management of the system across all the ICT team leaders so each could look after and develop their own teams' processes etc., but over a year on and that hasn't happened yet. It could easily be a full time job looking after the system and developing processes so I struggle sometimes to fit this in alongside the rest of my workload. I've been doing what I can to create new processes, mainly to help my own team and streamline some of their work. Two other managers have the ability to contact support if required when I'm off and they get notifications of any issues. 

Ours currently isn't a very complex instance as we're still relatively new to using Hornbill, and we only have around 30 BPMs, a couple of these are test processes are duplicates of our main processes that I use to test changes before making them in the main process. We're looking at getting some other departments in the organisation onboard using Hornbill in some way to help them streamline their own working practices. Again, it will be me that does this work unless I can get someone to help out.

Thanks

Janet

 

[Berto2002]

Hi folks,

My role is Incident, Problem and Change Manager but I am also primary administrator for Hornbill; badged as "velocITy" internally. It's great to have control over the process and tool for my job! Although the team started-out thinking admins would be truly distributed, in reality, unless one is immersed regularly in it or the type of thinking comes naturally, it's hard for others to pick-up competence. I basically do everything when possible (and all the BPM work) but we have others with emerging capabilities in the following areas:

1. Service Desk Manager leading on IC forms to enhance customer experience and data capture. Always consults me in case of data pass-through issues to BPM. They have access to admins and went through Hornbill training to act in emergencies
2. A Service Desk analyst acting as my padawan as part of their personal development plan. They poll Sdesk colleagues regularly for CSI opportunities and we're using that as training and that also covers the checks/housekeeping, He's been called "baby Rob"
3. Operations Manager and Service Transition Manager. Both have access to admins and went through Hornbill training to act in emergencies / can report issues to Support. They assist with Reporting engine
4. IT Procurement 'team' manage the Supplier and Contract data
5. Applications Product Managers manage some of the data in Service Portfolio which affects their Application Portfolio Management report
6. Apps triage and Sdesk analysts update bulletins and Categories/Profiles
7. Two of the infra team share the procedures and knowledge about the Import scripts, API, Keysafe, scheduler, AD Groups, Teams and O365 integration
8. Software Licence and Asset Manager manages all the Asset data and leads me on how BPMs should interface with them (we have BPM-driven asset creation, assignment and status change steps)

Stats (approx):

• 133 Service Portfolio entries
• 400 Cat Items
• 45 active BPMs
• 100 Active IC forms
• 3000 Requests processed per month (including those 'spawned' from each other)
• 40 active reports; some feeding 10 Power BI visual pages
• 2000 Customers (that's the no. of staff of our org, sync'd in through AD when created and archived by BPM when they leave)
• 40 external organisations (schools, etc) with approx 150 contacts where we provide some level of service
• 10 inbound email routing rules and rule templates to bring-in tickets (Our Sdesk are 100% online only; no email and no phone)
• 4 Teams channel integrations: Major Incidents, Change, Security, Problem, BaU
• 50 Organisation Groups (used as Subscribers Groups, sync from O365)
• 25 Teams for Request assignments
• 74 ICT Full Users and 20 additional Collabs

Examples of planned developments / expansions:

1. On-boarding HR team to handle all HR queries
2. Councillor Case Management process
3. Entrance Hall process (ICT new demand)
4. TDA (Technical Design Authority) IT architect process

How do we manage?

• I try to opt for an iterative CSI approach most of the time and all alterations get logged on a OneNote file so we can always see who did it and when. If we fail we fix fast. Average one BPM fail a fortnight think; usually due to bad data!
• We have some standard changes for known BPM/IC combo alterations such as adding a new line of business application to all the starter, leaver, mover and name change flows
• We use Change Management for complex functionality released; including use of a test service to run UAT with stakeholders
• I have a document that captures all the types of BPM fails we've had for the last two years so colleagues can always search in my absence. Each is explained in terms of the logic of troubleshooting and what was done to fix in the past. Gives them a fighting chance if I am away
• The more complex procedures are all written down and some of the solutions have documents too; like how the whole of Councillor Case Management hangs together
• We have documents that cover things like custom field use for each BPM, what the custom fields in each SM element are assigned to, etc; these really help

Hope that's useful. Was useful for me to summarise at this time of year for annual review (local authority, no bonus tho...)

[lee mcdermott]

@davidrb84

 

Hi David,

 

much the same as the 2 above, pretty much everything done and supported by myself. For us after initial setup I have added new services and forms gradually over time, but as I have to fit this in with my normal day job so to speak I have never had the time to really develop our instance further and certainly over the years as new features are added I have not been able to keep abreast of what these new features are and therefore not really been able to take advantage of them.

I think there is now realisation from our organisation that to get the best out of the system we really need to invest the time and resource in doing it to try to achieve what we want. 

 

Whether that will happen is another matter.

 

thank

lee

 

In order 

[davidrb84]

Thank you all for your comprehensive responses. Really helpful in thinking about how we approach support going forwards