Delivering a premium digital experience is more than just clever features and functionality: it’s about maximizing uptime for end users. Our ongoing work with a Fortune 500 healthcare company illustrates just how important a seamless incident management process is to ensure product stability, and customer and employee happiness. Tasktop integrated the organization’s ITSM tool—ServiceNow—to its Agile development tools—Atlassian Jira och Microsoft Azure DevOps—to optimize its ability to resolve users’ problems faster across all systems. The integration was able to support this company as it works through improving its ITSM maturity. The benefits of automating the flow of work between teams across the toolchain have a profound impact across the entire business; from the software delivery organization that builds and maintains the product portfolio, to the front-line healthcare workers providing critical patient care during the pandemic.
Chaotic Work Intake for Incident Management
Like many organizations, the healthcare company uses ServiceNow for IT support and incident reporting for issues such as product defects. However, the IT team was running into problems when it came to organizing and triaging their backlog because different development teams used two different tools in their software lifecycle. Some teams use Jira, and others use Azure DevOps depending on the product value stream. Their current process involves creating a defect from an incident, only when a code-fix is required. It was hard to know which defect was for which team, creating a time-consuming and chaotic work intake process that undermined their mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) and, in turn, their user happiness. The IT team sought a way to automatically assign tickets to the right development team’s tool.
Automating Your Incident Management Process
Using Tasktop—the leading solution in value stream integration and value stream management (VSM)—the IT team was able to easily integrate ServiceNow to Jira and Azure DevOps. Tasktop automatically filters and routes a ServiceNow defect to the right team to:
- Accelerate resolution time
- Eradicate waste and manual overhead
- Enable all teams to continue working without ever having to leave their tool of choice.
Tasktop does this by:
- Filtering out defects that belong to application teams who are not using Jira or Azure DevOps for defect management
- Filtering out defects that do not require a developer’s attention
- Automatically routing defects to Jira or Azure DevOps, based on what tool is being used by the application development
- Routing defects to the correct project used to manage the application
Tasktop uses the following features in order to accomplish this:
- Repository Query – reduces the performance impact on ServiceNow
- Key-Value Store – map application teams to projects
- Artifact Filtering – filter based on Defect-Tracking tool used (Jira or Azure DevOps)
- Conditional Routing – route to the right project
How Tasktop Supports Use Cases Between ServiceNow, Jira and Azure DevOps
Automated Traceability – Simplified Reporting for Compliance
In addition to automating the data flow between tools and teams to enhance collaboration and productivity, Tasktop also traces all work across the toolchain to simplify reporting. Providing one source of truth, IT teams at heavily-regulated companies can now easily access the data they need to build compliance reports for audits.
Toolchain Integration that’s 4x Faster, 10x Easier
Tasktop is a leader in value stream management because of its ability to provide two independent, but complementary, VSM experiences that enable organizations to start their journey where their need is most acute. Whether that’s visibility with Planview Viz™ to measure and analyze the flow of business value, or integration and automation with Planview Hub to accelerate that flow.
When it comes to integration, Planview Hub is 4x faster to set up and 10x easier to maintain than any other solution, while also offering the best total cost of ownership. Tasktop helps teams collaborate seamlessly, never having to leave their tool of choice or copy and paste information. There are several unique advantages to using Tasktop’s intuitive, point-and-click, no-code solution:
- Avoid plugin pandemonium: Many tools may offer inexpensive plugins for ServiceNow, but these plugins lack the scale that software delivery organizations with thousands of employees need. With very narrow functionality, no granular control over behavior and proliferated point-to-point integration between tools, inexpensive plugins are unsuited for large organizations. Tasktop provides a scalable integration infrastructure for Enterprise IT, providing admins with full control over workflow, field updates, field display, and data transformation.
- Reliable version support: Your toolchain is constantly being updated as vendors release new software updates and APIs, meaning your tools can lose compatibility with one another quickly. Not only does this cause data discrepancies and require teams to revert to manual synchronization until the problem gets resolved, but it can even cause a complete integration outage. Tasktop’s Integration Factory runs over half a million tests every night on over 300 tool versions to ensure your integrations will continue to work even as you upgrade to the latest and greatest version.
- Making sense of your data: With so much variability in the way teams capture, organize and manage their work in multiple systems of record, it can be exceedingly hard to create meaningful metrics without a lot of manual data manipulation. Taskop’s model-based integration standardizes the information exchanged by integrations, normalizing the data in real-time as it flows across repositories. It can also store the normalized data into a reporting database, making it possible to generate reports and metrics across tools easily.
- No Coding Required: There’s a big difference between “low code” and “no code”. It can be tempting to try to build your own integration solution using ServiceNow’s pre-built connectors and a workflow orchestrator. But this doesn’t come without problems. You still need to design and code the business logic and workflow, which will require significant developer resources to program, test and maintain (in an ever-changing environment). Onboarding is also typically slow because what you build must take into account each team’s own implementation of tool, process, and workflow. And because you can only address projects one at a time, large scale adoption can take years. Tasktop’s out-of-the-box, point-and-click configuration gives enterprises rapid time-to-value and allows you to roll out the integrations at scale, while accommodating each project and product’s needs.
To learn more about how Tasktop can help you integrate ServiceNow, we invite you to schedule a personalized demo with our team.
You can also begin mapping and visualizing flow across your value streams with our Value Stream Architects. Speak to us today about architecting around flow.
