The ability to look across your entire IT environment and clearly understand which systems support which services will get you far in any IT project. But as Gartner recommends, companies shouldn’t only incorporate IT service dependency mapping (IT SDM) capabilities in their project toolkits but also leverage them for improvement programs, which rely on dependency data to enhance the way teams work. To gain the greatest benefit, Gartner suggests companies carefully assess the flexibility of tools as well as their ability to integrate with the existing environment.
As one of the vendors highlighted in a recent Gartner report on IT asset discovery tool selection, we spoke with a ReadyWorks customer to get their perspective on how ReadyWorks integrated with their existing IT service management (ITSM) tools to create additional value.
Tying asset management to business unit projects
To ensure they stay ahead of the game, one global financial services customer operates an innovation center where they continually evaluate the latest technology. The team is responsible for hosting and maintaining the assets other business units utilize to drive continuous innovation across the company.
The firm uses Jira to track details of project requests. End users log requests in Jira and enter information that include project summary, start and end dates, and the stakeholders and business units that are tied to that project. Using Jira, the innovation team maintains an excellent understanding of the ongoing projects within their environment. Their challenge was to figure out how to dynamically track the equipment used to support these projects back to the business unit that requested them so they could monitor usage and recover those assets when projects ended.
Creating a link between projects and assets
The team used a connector to match Jira project information with ReadyWorks asset information. This allowed them to allocate assets to a project request and understand, in real time, which equipment was being used by which team for which project. This resulted in positive changes to the way they worked:
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Enhanced asset tracking efficiency: By having a clickable link to a virtual set of assets, much less time and effort is now spent on reclaiming assets. It’s easy to see who has the equipment and where it’s located, because even if a project has changed hands that information is in the ticket, along with the list of assets.
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Reporting: It became simpler to create reports that show the number of projects underway around the company that rely on the technology provided by the innovation center.
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Continuing company innovation: Because the process of reclaiming assets has become easier and quicker to do, other projects can now gain access to equipment sooner to begin their innovation programs.
The team also found they benefitted in terms of employee engagement.
“With greater data transparency there’s less of a need now to chase up teams, so that those working on their own innovation projects don’t feel like we are closely auditing them, and we can have a better conversation around reclaiming assets”
And the benefits won’t stop there. In the future the team would like to manage on-prem equipment in the same way that the public cloud is managed. “So, with your Azure subscription you are able to create a virtual project pack that allocates resources, including costs – and we want to be able to do that on-prem in the future leveraging the information we have gained using ReadyWorks.”
Interested in finding out how ReadyWorks can integrate with your existing ITSM tools to cut the time and effort of your projects and improvement programs? Schedule a demo
