When a major State College needed a less costly (but equally capable) help desk solution for their students and faculty, they turned to Trundl for help
The Challenge
The State College was part of a system of 28 colleges across the state, enrolling over 640,000 students in both 2-year and 4-year degree programs. They had a 4-year investment in ServiceNow as their tool for handling student operations (ie dorm applications), technical requests, and more. The instance touched 95+ identified functional groups, and 200+ back-end agents and approvers (combined). There were roughly 150 workflows. Peoplesoft was in use for HRMS operations, and Onbase was the chose repository.
ServiceNow was costly, not only from a licensing perspective ($130,000/yr), but in terms of the human resources needed to maintain it. The IT staff was very limited in their ability to maintain and configure their ServiceNow instance, struggling with the technical skills needed (JavaScript, HTML, CSS, .NET).
Maintaining and scaling the ServiceNow instance could have been solved by a third party (ServiceNow Partner), however it was cost-prohibitive.
The State College looked outward to Atlassian Partner, Trundl, to run a cost comparison between ServiceNow and an equivalent Jira Service Management (JSM) Solution, and then to build a proof of concept for their service agents and administrators to test, before deploying officially to the student body. The project began once the students left for summer break (May), and was to be completed and ready for hand-off for the winter break of the following year (December).
Project acceptance came from demos and stakeholder meetings with Trundl, reinforcing to the State College’s decision to go with an Atlassian solution. JSM met their needs for serving students, staff and faculty.
The Solution
Trundl started with a formal discovery engagement called ‘myAtlassian Blueprint.’ This is a time & material service allowing for solution architects to work on parallel paths to gain as much use case knowledge before designing a solution, including interviewing the target teams. Trundl also covered discovery for configuration-mapping between ServiceNow and JSM, as well as extensive interviews on the State College’s service processes, integration opportunities, priorities, and more.
Trundl scoped a 395-480 hour engagement to support a 9-month transition to JSM.
Trundl’s Agile approach included setting up a core group for test/acceptance as project configurations were released. Trundl also set up an Atlassian-specific help desk with supporting knowledge base and user training guides to aid acceptance. This also allowed Trundl to build backlogs of features for future consideration and process improvements as teams got hands-on with JSM.
Adoption was paramount, so there was a strong focus on power users to plan and deliver “train the trainer” training sessions. The State College wanted to administer the JSM instance autonomously, so Trundl designed permission schemes based on roles, allowing users to make local changes, add/remove users, make changes to unique configurations for their respective projects.
The Results
Trundl delivered the flexible, user-friendly solution for the State College’s IT and stakeholders. Switching from ServiceNow to Jira Service management was 38% less expensive from licensing alone. Moreover, the solution was much easier to maintain and scale.
