Overview
HP Consulting & Integration offers a rich portfolio of services which enable greater business agility. Based on its Business Technology Outcomes strategy, the group helps enterprises access, share and synchronize applications and data across existing heterogeneous environments. Alcatel-Lucent designs and delivers networks for the world's largest communications service providers and is one of HP Consulting & Integration’s major accounts.

Challenge
Enhancing ‘Best Practices for Service Desk’ at HP and Retrofitting Change Management at Alcatel-Lucent

While working with Alcatel-Lucent on an award-winning IT service management (ITSM) implementation involving 13 ITIL processes in parallel, the HP C&I team gained important knowledge that would serve as the inspiration for further initiatives.

John Clark, solution architect for HP C&I’s Americas ITSM/HP Software Team, said that the intricate Alcatel-Lucent ITSM project had taught them the importance of being able to model multiple, integrated processes in parallel.

“In the past, processes were modeled simplistically and individually and then organically built upon existing processes already implemented. The Alcatel-Lucent CIO recognized, as are many now, that there is experience in the industry—that it would take too long, and be too costly—therefore simultaneous process implementation was necessary. In addition, we realized that Sarbanes-Oxley compliance was a big driver that had to be incorporated into the solutions HP offers,” he said.

So HP C&I took what they learned to tackle two additional key initiatives. First, an internal HP C&I project to improve the HP’s Best Practices for Service Desk (BP4SD) solution, and then to retrofit that new solution to optimize the formerly implemented Change Management process at Alcatel-Lucent—addressing process quality and compliance issues.

Metastorm ProVision’s powerful Enterprise Modeling toolset enables HP C&I to successfully address these challenges.

The HP OpenView Service Desk is a comprehensive, scalable IT service desk solution based on a unified configuration management foundation. BP4SDv1 was utilized in the original HP C&I/Alcatel-Lucent project. The objectives for BP4SDv2 were to:

• Improve the ITSM process content-- leveraging the learning and discovery from BP4SDv1
• Provide COBIT integration for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance
• Pre-configure OpenView Service Desk to match ITIL processes developed in ProVision

Results
A Powerful Combination of Tools and Services

HP C&I team members were originally introduced to Metastorm ProVision (formerly Proforma ProVision) during the HP/Compaq merger in 2002. Since that time, ProVision has become a standard HP worldwide modeling tool, and specifically in Consulting and Integration with more than 130 consultants trained as users.

“Our ultimate goal for BP4SDv2 was to combine world-class ProVision software, world-class Service Desk software, and HP C&I’s extensive ITSM experience and ITIL Best Practices to create an accelerator solution for our customers,” said Clark.

The project team used Metastorm ProVision to drill down into the processes following the ISO 9000 triangle for documentation from high-level, process-driven policy to procedures, work instructions and artifacts at lower levels. Process phases for Service Desk include change, incident, service call and problem. Clark said a phase typically maps to several activities in the process flows. For example, the Incident Management Process Phases include entitlement, categorization, diagnosis, resolution and closure.

Tools like Visio, PowerPoint and Word were used by HP to compile and store the best practice processes. But collateral could not be linked without significant effort, according to Clark. For version 2 of BP4SD, HP C&I would move all those processes into Metastorm ProVision where they could be published and integrated at the touch of a button.

“We had good information before, but we weren’t able to link to it using Visio or keep the consistency to the level needed. That’s a benefit of using ProVision,” he said. “Now we know what we have in the ProVision repository, and it’s easily accessible.”

Retrofitting Change Management at Alcatel-Lucent
After hearing about BP4SDv2, the ITSM Lead architect and Change Manager from Alcatel-Lucent wanted to further leverage the concepts and capabilities of BP4SD into their existing Change Management process as a means of communicating and training on the change process. Thus HP C&I and Alcatel-Lucent engaged on the project to “retro-fit” Change Management.

Clark said the Alcatel-Lucent Change Management improvement project had several drivers:

• Supporting new users of the Change Management process with real time training options.
• Guiding users through the tool and process navigation required a great degree of manual intervention from the Change Management team.
• The Change Management On-Call Manager would also receive numerous “out of hours” requests for assistance with the tool and process navigation.
• Version 1 of the Service Desk tool did not have built-in capability to provide on-line process/workflow self help.