System C is the UK’s leading health and social care software supplier. Its products include the Medway electronic patient record and associated products, CarePlus Child Health, Vitalpac mobile clinical care, Careflow care messaging and the Liquidlogic range of social care software supporting adults’ and children’s services. System C offers a hands-on deployment service, delivering all aspects of a project from the preparation of the initial brief to post go-live support. Their products are installed across 58 local authorities and 108 NHS Trusts.
The pressing challenge
The System C team had been working on sourcing and implementing an ITSM solution for two years before new owners were brought into place - changing the scope of the project. The owners agreed that a transformation of System C’s current IT service desk was required, but also wanted to complement this with a large scale Jira Software implementation, along with a move into the cloud. "We’d previously been using an internal bug tracking system, but it really wasn’t working for us" says Averil Franklin Stewart, Atlassian Tooling Expert, System C. "External customers had no view into the status of their requests, and agents had to manually enter phone conversations and copy and paste email transcripts in order to lodge requests." The delivery of a new service desk solution hinged on a number of key criteria:- Affordable
- Intuitive for both staff and customers to use
- Able to support improved performance against SLAs
- Simple to implement within a three-month deadline
The right solution
The Valiantys team provided in-depth consultancy for two weeks, pouring over ideas, concepts and data to devise a solution that would effectively fit System C’s needs. "We made great use of Valiantys’ consultancy – they were incredibly in-depth and fast-moving, enabling us to implement three service desks and two ancillary systems within a very tight deadline" Averil says. Once Jira Service Desk was firmly in place, Valiantys then worked to move System C’s development teams to Jira Software for better traceability, improved reporting capabilities and better stability across the software development lifecycle. This project was driven by an aim to become more Agile and improve development practices. Over time Valiantys has implemented the SAFe framework for Agile development, with teams trained on Scrum and Agile to leave them better equipped to respond to business challenges and achieve faster time to market.The concrete benefits
While the switch to Atlassian tools came with a steep learning curve, both feedback and tangible results have been very positive. "Both the techies and devs love the new tools" Averil says. "While the change was very rapid, staff were quick to get on track and pick up on the huge raft of benefits of what they can do with Jira Software and Jira Service Desk. Even some people who were initially resistant to the change came up to me and said they really loved Jira!" Jira Service Desk now enables the team to work with bulletproof SLA calculations, and the team also benefits from a cast iron audit trail – greater transparency means that customers can access the system themselves and see the status of individual items. The team had received 35,000 tickets from staff and customers, and is easily taking more than 1,750 calls a month. SLA breaches are also down to almost zero. Jira Software, meanwhile, boasts a host of features that the team has harnessed to save time and drive productivity. These include:- The ability to set up and configure individual dashboards quickly and easily
- Big jumps in productivity thanks to Agile boards
- The Jira Miscellaneous Workflow Extensions app to automate the system – items update problems automatically as they transition through the workflow process
- The Valiantys Exocet app, which makes it simple to move items around across teams and departments
