Improving Service with a No-Code Tool for ITSM and PPM

If you’ve ever run an IT department, you know how crucial it is to have the right tools in place. When managing operations, projects, services and resources, the right tool can make all the difference. With the right tools in place, you can save resources, streamline processes and have effective communication in place to keep everything running smoothly, ensuring all projects and services stay on track.

What you might not know is that there are no-code work management solutions that unify tickets, projects and integrations on a single platform. If your goal is to streamline processes and boost communication and transparency within your organization, integrating IT Service Management (ITSM), Project Portfolio Management (PPM) and integration and automation (iPaaS) into one platform is the way to go.

This approach offers a comprehensive solution for effective resource capacity planning, better communication between teams and enhanced transparency into the work happening within IT and across various departments.

Working Better Together

By having ITSM, PPM and iPaaS on a single, codeless platform, processes are streamlined from start to finish. Combining these elements in one solution means teams can complete tasks more quickly without switching between different software or platforms. This speeds up service delivery and significantly reduces costs due to fewer man-hours spent managing resources.

When these tools are on a codeless platform, you can democratize workflow and integration building. IT resources aren’t bogged down with endless requests, cutting down integration backlogs while maintaining visibility, security and governance over connections and automations built outside of IT. This allows technically inclined employees in departments like HR or facilities to integrate and automate their processes and software, increasing transparency across the organization. This transparency helps stakeholders make better, data-driven decisions about strategy, reducing silos that often exist in larger organizations. Plus, teams outside of IT will appreciate not having to pause projects while waiting on IT backlogs and resource constraints.

Transforming Service and Project Management at the City of Madison

At the City of Madison, the TeamDynamix platform is being used to support digital transformation initiatives with great success.

The team implemented TeamDynamix ITSM with PPM – focusing on self-service to kick off the city’s IT service delivery transformation according to Abigail Ferguson, Customer Success Manager for the City of Madison’s Information Technology.

“We are seeing the same resource constraints other cities are,” she said. “We are understaffed at times and need to focus on higher-value implementations. So, anything we can do to empower our users to find the resources they need for self-service is a must for us.”

Like many other businesses and organizations – the demand for service has gone up exponentially over the last few years as IT now has to support better digital experiences and a “service anywhere, anytime” mentality, even within the public sector.

To address the growing demand, the City of Madison is taking a proactive approach and combining Project Portfolio Management with ITSM using a single platform through TeamDynamix, “This is going to help us really get a sense of what projects align with our strategic goals. We can see what projects align with our service catalog that exist today and take a more proactive approach with our customers and other agencies,” Ferguson said.

This single platform approach for ITSM and PPM is also going to help the city identify what projects should be high priority and what projects can be turned down or scheduled for a later time, “In government, you can’t always say no – it’s more of a ‘we can do that later’ so we want to be able to support our staff and our citizens the best we can by prioritizing the work,” Ferguson said.

When it came to making the switch to TeamDynamix, improved communication and transparency were big factors. Both are things citizens were asking for when it came to doing business with the city.

Ferguson said the legacy ticketing system they were using only provided people “barebones” updates on the status of their tickets, “It was a black hole. They’d get these updates just at the start of the ticket and at the end when the ticket was complete,” she said. “We had a lot of complaints about that. Our customers wanted transparency, they wanted buy-in, they wanted to have a stake in their request and to be able to provide feedback to us.”

So when it came to switching to TeamDynamix, the culture was already in place to move forward and embrace a more transparent approach to service management and delivery.

“The IT customer portal specifically has been an ongoing selling point for us to get buy-in internally,” Ferguson said of the new portal launched with TeamDynamix. “As we’ve started to implement [TeamDynamix] we’ve had good feedback from our helpdesk on what would be better for customers to submit through the portal or resolve through self-service.”

And it’s this readiness for change that’s led to the successful implementation of the new ITSM system and continues to power the organization as they better processes throughout IT and beyond.

“It’s been a journey of enabling folks to feel like they have the right to the knowledge that we all have had – nothing is secret anymore,” Ferguson said. “Our customers want to be able to participate, and every time we get feedback from our customers our user experience gets better and better, and we’re doing our jobs better.”

Automate IT: Why Integration and Automation Matter for Service Management

The benefits of a one-platform solution for ITSM and PPM are even greater when you include an integration component. By combining iPaaS (integration platform as a service) with ITSM and PPM on a single platform, you can automate both complex and simple tasks, connecting disparate systems across your organization.

Employees no longer have to spend time on repetitive tasks like password resets, name change requests, ticket triage and more, freeing them up for larger projects. These tasks, and more, can be automated with workflows using iPaaS.

With a codeless iPaaS platform, anyone can use these tools, not just IT. Allowing business lines to create their own workflows frees up IT resources for larger projects and eliminates bottlenecks in integration within your organization.

If you want to see how more organizations supercharge their service management, read this eBook: Automate IT – A Playbook for Supercharged ITSM.