CASE STUDY: Leicestershire County Council SECTOR: Local Government

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1 CASE STUDY: Leicestershire County Council SECTOR: Local Government Successful SDI Accreditation for Leicestershire County Council helped by Marval and MSM MSM integrated IT Service Management software solutions have been adopted by organisations across many diverse sectors worldwide; from public services to publishing, from travel to telecoms and from entertainment to education. Like all government run agencies, Leicestershire County Council has a need and a responsibility to save money. The ICT service must not only meet this requirement but also has to deliver the highest level of customer support. In order to ensure that its services continue to be efficient and cost effective it has undertaken a programme of service improvements, including; being accredited by the Service Desk Institute (SDI), being measured against the Government s Customer Service Excellence Standard, and adopting the ITIL best practice framework. All these initiatives have been helped by the implementation of MSM service management software and the knowledge transfer by Marval experts as service management consultants and practitioners. Introduction Leicestershire County Council provides a wide range of local services to over 600,000 people. The county is set in the heart of England and covers a number of market towns, with the population being split between a few small urban areas, extensive suburban areas and a range of rural settlements. The county includes the towns of Loughborough and Melton Mowbray to the north, Market Harborough to the south east and Hinckley and Ashby-de-la Zouch to the west. ICT is delivered to the Council through an ICT Operations team, dealing with support and maintenance of equipment, software and infrastructure and a Strategic Information and Technology team which deals with policy, security and data management. ICT Operations supports over 7,000 end users, mostly employees of the Council but also external customers in district councils and other government agencies and organisations. The ICT Service Desk which is accredited to Service Desk Institute Standards (three stars), provides incident and service request management, advice and guidance to all of these users. Page 1 of 6

2 MSM and ICT Operations Maxine Hubbard, Service Support Manager, ICT Operations explains. Leicestershire County Council is a local government authority and anyone who follows the news will know that the major issue affecting any government run organisation is lack of money. Efficiency savings have never been more vital and in ICT Operations we know the value of operating within a tried and tested framework; we chose ITIL with robust, lean processes. Our incident management process is extremely mature and MSM software enables us to prioritise and categorise our requests very easily. We have been able to add additional criteria to the request classifications whenever we have needed to collect additional information, such as figures to show how much we utilise expensive remote administration tools, how well we review potential first contact resolutions and how well we control our need for 2nd line support visits to our remote sites. She continues, When dealing with major incidents, we are able to sound an audible alert and to highlight this above all other issues in the system. We can even have a banner running across our customer web portal so that users know, in real time, when a major incident is occurring. One of my favourite features is the notice board which appears once you sign in to MSM. This enables us to remind ICT colleagues about matters which will affect them. MSM has expanded the channels of communication available to us to communicate incidents around the unit and to customers. ICT Operations have a mature change management process in place, with its problem management process fast catching up. MSM is configured to provide detailed information about changes and positive metrics to support the problem management development. This enables the maintenance of valuable dashboards and the calculation of savings in terms of effort, time and money. The team has also integrated MSM with an asset discovery tool for remote desktop management and are looking at integrating MSM with their VOIP telephony system. This will ensure that they can to take full advantage of the auto-population facility within the product to save time for the Service Desk analysts. SDI Accreditation In 2011, the Council s ICT Operations team embarked on an ambitious project to gain accreditation with the Service Desk Institute. It scrutinised the set of standards that it would have to achieve and used evidence from MSM to demonstrate the required working practices. These included: escalation processes; service level agreement information; assignment of priorities and classification and routing of calls. It also utilised the error control and request matching functions within the product to assist in achieving a 75% first-contact resolution rate (and rising) and be able to demonstrate its mature change and problem management processes. Page 2 of 6

3 An integrated approach to service management that will The Authority s Customer Services and Operations, of which ICT Operations is a part of, are also accredited against the government s Customer Service Excellence Standard. MSM was able to produce evidence to support compliance with many aspects of this standard including keeping customers and colleagues informed (regular updates), logging and processing complaints and commendations and recording service improvements to show that the customer experience was being continually improved. The MSM product has become one of the critical services in use in ICT Operations. Its main advantage to me as a service manager is its configurability. We can adapt it to record just about anything we wish to report on. Maxine Hubbard. A proud service desk team on achieving Service Desk Accreditation with Maxine Hubbard (Front centre) holding the SDI trophy alongside Howard Kendall, SDI Founder and Chairman (Front left) and Byron Rhodes, County Councillor, holding the certificate (Front right) Page 3 of 6

4 Why Marval and MSM? Maxine Hubbard outlines some of the reasons for the selection of Marval and MSM. Leicestershire County Council chose MSM over other tools for a number of reasons. Firstly, the tool was easy to use and had the functionality we needed. Like many ICT organisations, we have suffered from lack of adherence to good, robust processes from time to time and we hoped that we could build in safeguards to force certain processes to be followed. The workflow element of MSM certainly helped here. Secondly, MSM was less expensive than many competitors. The incident, change, and problem and configuration management sections of the tool were all included in the quotation there was nothing hidden. Thirdly, Marval as an organisation is quite local to us only 40 miles or so down the road. We felt this would help in the relationship between the two organisations and I m pleased to say that that this is true. If we have a major problem, someone jumps in their car and is with us to help. When Marval runs one of its regular customer workshops, or if we need additional help with particular aspects of our operation, we drive down the road to Marval. It has been a useful aspect. Since the introduction of MSM into our workplace, we have been able to implement a very lean structure with defined roles, responsibilities and levels of authority. The reliance on ICT has grown hugely, particularly in respect of the need to cut costs. We simply would not have been able to successfully manage this without a robust tool to manage incidents, service requests, ICT assets, changes and problems. MSM really has become a critical tool for the ICT management operation. In terms of financial benefits, we have been able to mature our ICT Service Desk over the eight years we have had MSM and are well on track to achieve our vision of 80% first-contact resolution rate. This has enabled us to move activities from more specialist and thereby expensive areas of the operation to a team focussing on customer service, automation and lean processes, driving down our costs and improving response time to customers. Going forward, we are looking to develop our configuration management process including developing our mapping of asset relationships. We have added many additional teams to our MSM instance over the years as it is a very scalable and adaptable product. We use the web self-service portal for customers to request additional facilities. This is because we have implemented some MSM projects which allow us to fire multiple calls from one request, so when a customer, for example, requests a new user to be set up, we can deal with all aspects of that request which can fall across multiple teams at once. Page 4 of 6

5 Marval has been a supplier of the Council since 2004, providing not only our IT service management system but also support, training, advice and time at its in free customers workshops, industry conferences and seminars to discuss mutual issues. It is also fair to say that our relationship with Marval has matured over the years, as has the product itself. We feel that we can call up the Marval Service Desk and ask advice from people who really understand the product and understand the pressures on our business. Leicestershire County Council ICT Operations have been able to provide feedback and suggest enhancements to MSM products and now feel that the two organisations are like-minded partners interested in first class service management. Page 5 of 6

6 About Marval Marval is committed to the ongoing development of integrated IT Service Management (ITSM) software, consultancy and education. It is a single-source supplier for all your ITSM needs, designed to improve service quality, productivity, customer satisfaction and reduce costs. MSM - an ITIL process compliant and ISO/IEC compatible, integrated software solution ensures a reliable IT and service infrastructure, increased productivity and adaptability in service provision. It has been implemented by organisations across many diverse sectors worldwide. MSM is used by internal and external support and by providers of outsourced and managed services. Marval is a major practitioner, innovator, thought leader and contributor to Best Practice and standards in ITSM and is co-author of ITIL and ISO/IEC It has been helping customers deliver service excellence since 1989 and understands what it takes to become a world-class service team. Marval is an ISO/IEC registered company supporting internal and external customers to international standards. Contact us now to discuss how you can improve your service Marval and MSM are Registered Trade Marks of Marval Software Limited. The Swirl logo is a trade mark of the Cabinet Office. ITIL is a registered trade mark of the Cabinet Office. Marval also recognises the trade mark rights of any 3rd party trade mark owners mentioned in this document. Page 6 of 6