Decision Maker's Guide - Evaluation Checklist for ITSM Solutions High Level Requirements Ability to support a 24x7 service desk operation Ability to provide workflow capabilities for efficient incident, problem, change and configuration management Ability to provide integrated incident, problem, and change management Ability to provide secure access via a portal for all employees Ability to support email incident management Ability to provide an integrated and flexible reporting suite Ability to provide robust support service to clients and demonstrate that your organization is stable and has a long-term commitment to this solution Ability to automate and manage processes beyond the traditional ITSM realm. Must be able to easily automate other core IT and business processes Support, Performance & Infrastructure Requirements Describe the product architecture Ability to support multi-tenancy Ability to provide full system resilience/ failover in the event of software failure Ability to support consistent processes across global operations while retaining the flexibility to easily support regional service delivery differences Ability to support multiple enviroments allowing rapid development, versioning and deployment Ability to access the system via a web interface. List supported browsers
Demonstrated ability to scale to support 10,000+ users Ability to allow users within the same company to view any incident raised by the same company, or limit a user's rights so as to be able to only view incidents raised by that individual Ability to set different roles and maintain granular sets of permissions based on roles Process Management Support Ability to graphically change processes and define new processes Ability to drive the system logic via the process models Ability to graphically define swimlanes on the processes to easily identify roles assigned with each step in the process Ability to automatically propagate changes to processes to the application Ability to automate approvals/ rejections based on business rules Ability to easily automate processes that connect people-to-people, people-to-systems, and systems-to-systems easily supported Ability to provide the end user with a view of the process directly from within the application, that is always up to date Customization Model Ability to leverage a drag-and-drop graphical environment to customize the application that obviates the need for intensive coding and scripting Ability to easily preserve customizations with upgrades Ability to perform customizations with minimum levels of technical prowess and training
Ability to build out related processes using the application with minimal effort Ability to easily configure clients. Please describe Incident, Problem & Change Management Functionality Ability for Support Analysts to have a clear view of the incidents assigned to them and their priority Ability to prioritize "critical" incidents based on specific clients Ability to log and close a "quick incident" whilst the client is on the phone Ability for users to attach documents, log files, screen prints etc easily (not multiple steps) Ability to group incidents together, even if they are from different customers, so as to be managed efficiently as one problem Ability to pre-populate the application forms based on certain rules (e.g., client and user information) Ability for to easily add entries to contact details within the application Ability to assist the analyst with resolving incidents by rapidly returning relevant knowledge base articles based on the incident title or summary that is being created Ability for team leaders/ supervisors to easily view all issues assigned to their team, by priority Ability to view full incident history in a clear, concise way. A user should not have to trawl through long email trails Ability to search for an incident by different criteria, including incident number, user, customer, topic etc
Ability to automatically reopen a closed incident if the Customer responds against it. If by email, then the system needs to send notifications to the person or team to ensure that they are aware that the incident has been reopened Ability to automatically raise a ticket or populate fields in a form (e.g., by an independent system monitoring tool) Ability for supervisors to close incidents in bulk as opposed to closing out individual incidents Ability to open an RFC against an incident, and automatically populate a change request form Ability to assign a primary owner to an incident even if it gets assgined to someone else to work on Ability to easily transition an incident from one analyst to another Ability to easily configure the screens to match our own requirements Ability for analysts to set their own user preferences and configure their own views of the system Ability to customize the incident flow and other process flows if necessary to reflect team structure/ business flows within support. Ability for these customizations to be performed by the Administrator without the requirement for external consultancy Ability to capture the time spent working the incident, problem, or change. This should be automatic but with the ability to update manually
Ability to support a structured, multi-action workflow (e.g., user setup where a number of actions are required, built-in dependencies, communication with other departments (e.g. SSD), clear audit trails) Ability to manage the system with minimal effort. Outline complexity of tasks involved Ability to leverage a spell checker within the application Escalation and Tiering Functionality Ability to automatically escalate if the incident is related to a particular client Ability to automatically escalate if a particular time limit is breached against an open call of a particular priority Ability to tier customers, with different levels of escalation based on tiering Ability to send escalation alerts via email Ability to start and stop timers on escalations - e.g., the clock starts ticking during working hours in a particular region. Ability to bulk upload/change data related to calls and users for easy maintenance of the data Security Model and Audit Trail Ability to support field-level security Ability to control field-level security by different types of roles Ability to control field-level security by groups Ability to control field-level security by specific named user Ability to track ALL changes to an individual work item in the audit log Ability for all users to view the audit log viewable via a graphical environment Ability to view the complete audit log directly from the incident, problem, change and CMDB screens
Ability to view the "before" and "after" view of changes in the audit log Ability to view the audit log tightly coupled with the graphical reports Email Support and Notifications Ability to automatically log incidents in the system if an email is sent to a particular address with a notification sent back to the person who raised the incident Ability to log incidents as soon as the email comes in - no delay based on a timed poll Ability to send out outgoing emails using configurable templates (e.g., with corporate logo and look-and-feel) Ability to create "internal only" incidents that are not visible to clients but are still associated with a specific client, as well as "external", client-facing incidents Ability to associate emails received by the system containing attachments with a ticket as opposed to detatching them and storing them elsewhere Ability to configure the system so as to trigger outgoing emails only when specific types of updates to an incident occur Ability to include data from the process (e.g., a stock or custom data field) within the notification Ability to use included or custom HTML templates for notifications Ability to send different notifications to different users after the same event Ability to send different notifications based on the data in the process Ability to send notifications at any stage in the process Ability for end users subscribe to and unsubscribe from particular notifications
Ease of Use Ability to provide unique interfaces based on user type Ability to adapt the interfaces to the user s task within the application Ability to configure the graphical user interface by dynamically adding windows or fields Ability to configure the graphical user interface based on individual, group or role-based preferences (colors, layout, etc.) Ability for a user to see all problems related to an incident without leaving the incident screen Ability for a user to see all changes related to an incident without leaving the incident screen Ability for a user to see all the CI relationships directly from the incident screen Ability for the user to see all known errors for a given CI without leaving the incident screen Ability for the user to search the web and other knowledge sources directly from the incident screen Management and Reporting Tools Ability to leverage out-of-the-box reports (listing, duratiom, distribution, trends). Please describe. Ability to create ad hoc reports via a guided experience (e.g., wizard-based) Ability to calculate the cumulative time spent on an incident or a problem and track how long it was open Ability to "drill down" from graphical dashboards to individual items Ability to use third-party reporting tools by leveraging a fully documented database schema
Ability to leverage business calendars within reports Knowledge Base Ability to access appropriate articles based on the text that is typed in when an incident is raised by leveraging the included integrated Knowledge Base Ability to clearly separate out the Knowledge base articles from incidents so it is clear what is knowledge as opposed to content related to a specific client incident Ability to mine incidents and knowledge base articles to find previous problems of a similar nature or to enable themes/ trends to be identified Ability to rate the quality/ usefulness of a knowledge item by the number of users of it in order to build a strong asset base of knowledge and solutions to problems Ability to rapidly search the knowledge base (for instance, the client may be on the phone) - for instance, it should return articles within 5 seconds of a search, with up to 10,000 knowledge articles Ability to provide clients with direct access to knowledge articles via links within an incident response Ability to optionally mark articles for external viewing; those that aren't marked are not made available to customers Ability to limit article contribution to those with permissions Ability to set a template for knowledge base articles Ability to categorize knowledge base articles by client, product area or functionality Ability to add external resources to be searched as part of the knowledge base
Self-Service Ability to publish an end-user friendly listing of services Ability to easily market available services via a portal Ability for end users to directly submit requests, get the status of requests, and search the knowledge base via a portal Ability to include graphics and detailed descriptions to service catalog entries Ability to submit service catalog entries submit to multiple endpoints, both inside and outside the ITSM system? Surveys Ability to create a survey that scores different aspects of the service provided Ability to email users a link to a survey to gather feedback on the service delivered Ability to correlate survey data with other incident metrics Implementation and Upgrade Support Ability to easily install the solution; components do not have to be manually installed Ability to support both on premise, on demand as well as hybrid deployment models Ability to import information into the system including contact details, knowledge articles etc Ability to migrate existing incidents into the system to ease the transition to a new application Outline the support provided by the vendor to facilitate smooth transition from an existing application to the new application Describe your professional services during implementation
Ability to seamlessly upgrade to new versions of the application. Describe the steps involved Ability to avail of training both on-site and off-site. Please describe. Describe the software testing process prior to release Describe the certification processes that you follow during the development, testing and implementation processes - e.g., ISO 9000 etc. Describe how client-specific configuration items are managed during an upgrade Support Services Detail your commitment to the software moving forward - e.g., frequency of new releases, commercial arrangements required to receive upgrades Detail your software retirement policy - e.g., how long are versions supported, how much notice is provided prior to retirement of a release Detail your ability to provide 24x7 support should high priority issues arise Outline your global support coverage Outline your turnaround time for responses in the event of software failures Cost Model Outline the cost model for the application. Specifically outline costs for stand-alone modules Detail the costs for users of the system, in particular for self-service users that access the portal Describe the costs for additional orchestration/ integration engines for system connectivity Outline the ongoing support costs, the various options and what is covered with those costs
Describe your training courses and the associated costs Provide your pricing for both on premise as well on demand deployments Product Direction & Strategy Describe your product roadmap and strategy for the next year