This award-winning, multinational law firm is headquartered in London with offices in 31 countries and a staff of 5,000. A member of the UK’s Magic Circle of leading law firms, it boasts unrivalled global reach with local depth, advising corporations, financial institutions, and governments across the world.
Main challenges
Unify operations across countries
The firm was using a proprietary facilities management application internationally. With much of the work done manually using MS Excel for some tasks, this tool lacked functionality in areas such as tracking centrally the replacement of equipment, servicing of the air-conditioning or lifts, booking desk moves or reporting spillage. Equally, there was no way of tracking costs of facilities management or whether service levels met agreed targets.
The IT Director at the firm, said: “The most serious effect of this shortcoming was lack of prioritisation, which had come to the attention of the business managers. The facilities employees were overworked. Reports on all queries were manual, which often meant information was incomplete and late.”
As an existing user of ServiceNow for incident, problem and change management, the client wanted to take advantage of the ServiceNow platform’s more powerful capability. They asked ServiceNow to recommend a partner to assist them. ServiceNow referred the client to Devoteam for a number of compelling reasons, including Devoteam’s international operation in 20 countries with 700+ ITSM consultants, breadth of technology experience in aligning IT infrastructure with business needs, its development methodology, and its excellent track record as the leading ServiceNow partner in the Legal sector with three customers in the top ten law firms.
What did we solve?
Eliminate operational inefficiencies
Devoteam liaised with key IT stakeholders and business services personnel at the client to analyse the requirement in a two-day workshop and create a solution roadmap. As the customer is experiencing significant change through global expansion – with an agile IT required to respond to demands anytime, anywhere – Devoteam decided that its RAPID method, a flexible eight-stage approach for the deployment of ServiceNow modules, would be the best fit for implementation.
RAPID is a product of the Devoteam ServiceNow Centre of Excellence, which has evolved from over 20 years’ experience in the ITSM industry across 17 countries. The approach is based on agile and scrum methods, providing best practice principles through a series of weekly sprints, utilising ServiceNow’s out-of-the-box functionality. Devoteam modified the out-of-the-box ServiceNow product, configured the data categories, the facilities catalogue, created a self-service form to log and assign facilities requests. The application would now set up reports and assign report cards to field engineers – a big step in creating efficiency.
Furthermore, Devoteam deployed ServiceNow’s Software Life Cycle (SDLC) Plugin to manage the project and document the configuration changes, leaving the client with a live repository to measure Devoteam’s progress and capture any stories for future development phases. Devoteam’s stress on automation and customer enablement ensure change through the full life cycle of an application within the business is properly managed.
Drawing on Devoteam’s experience of facilities management and ability to collaborate with different business units, the new system was successfully implemented in the summer of 2015.
The IT Director spoke of the outcome: “We like the work Devoteam did for us. They showed total understanding of our needs and not only did they give us what we asked for, but they also delivered our facilities application on time with a transfer of knowledge to our in-house team, including training of our users in London, Belfast and Spain. This showed great flexibility.”
Main benefits
Effective maintenance enhances the business
The firm seeks further competitive advantage with its ability to track facilities issues globally using a single system of information. Looking ahead, they can aim to move from reacting to problems to anticipating issues based on knowledge held on the new facilities system. Benefits include:
- Time saved on tracking problems and allocating resources for repairs
- Money saved through central tracking of costs for repairs
- Clearer information for business managers from better reporting
- Improved reporting for IT and the business brings better decision-making
- The facilities team is achieving service level agreements
- Improved productivity through resource prioritisation.
The IT Director concludes: “We look forward to drawing on Devoteam’s expertise in the future as their outlook and operation matches ours in an all-important area – global reach with local depth.”