Legally better
A leadin
g law firm’s IT team has increased service success rate from 60 to 92 percent with the installation of the Supportworks ITSM service management solution. Halliwells’ head of IT service, John Salt tells the story.
Halliwells is the fastest growing commercial law firm in the UK, with offices in Manchester, Liverpool, London and Sheffield. The firm has grown rapidly in recent years, with considerable investment in technology, including CRM software.
With such rapid growth and increased numbers of personnel, the firm has continued to invest in its IT infrastructure. With over 1,000 staff across its offices, it is vital that technology helps the firm to maintain characteristics of its success from when it was a smaller firm, such as its ability to respond rapidly to change, while gaining all the benefits of its increased size. The company has placed significant emphasis on developing a ‘follow me’ environment in its new headquarters located in Spinningfields, Manchester, following a relocation from five disparate offices in the city.
At the heart of this new working environment is IT and to support the systems that are so critical to its business operations, Halliwells has invested in Hornbill’s Supportworks IT service management (ITSM) software.
The IT team uses the new ITSM system both for the service desk and as key management tool to administer effective IT support. The system also played a central part in the success of the recent move to its headquarters.
“Hornbill’s Supportworks ITSM ticks every box for us,” said John Salt, head of IT Services at Halliwells. “We are using it for all aspects of our IT service management – not least incident, problem and change management. We have seen significant efficiency gains since using the system.”
Halliwells short-listed potential suppliers to two, and selected Hornbill’s solution for its advanced functionality, ITIL compatibility and the reporting features. The company intends to apply for ISO 20000 certification before the end of the year and is now almost halfway towards achieving this goal.
“We reviewed Hornbill and Touchpaper in the most depth, and really liked Hornbill’s product. It was the most advanced tool that could give us everything we wanted. We liked the human aspect of the user screens – the end-user photos were surprisingly well received,” explaines Salt. “When we saw the ITSM version we knew it was the right product for us – we knew that we wanted to go down that route.”
The new solution replaced an existing web-based call logging system. While the team could log calls on the previous system, these were assigned directly to a member of the team, with little visibility to anyone else. If that agent was off for a number of days then calls could go unnoticed, with no automatic escalation flagging that the calls were not being dealt with. From the management perspective it was difficult to gain an overall view of quantity of calls and speed of resolution, let alone assess who was working on what.
The new system is proving to be an invaluable management tool, not just for the support team but across the department. “We always knew it would be used for far more than the logging of support issues of course,” he says, “but we’ve been surprised at just how far-reaching a management tool it is. In a service environment it’s too easy for your infrastructure or application management teams to work on ‘the most recent request’, rather than to focus on work that might be more important but currently less visible. But by logging in the system all releases, changes, problems, incidents and other tasks, it’s easier to maintain lists of everything we need to work on, then see what our current priorities really are. And then as business priorities change, we can increase efficiency by re-prioritising accordingly.
“It’s also encouraged us to become a lot better at tracking and communicating progress on work, thanks to the diary features. And everything is tied together, as ITIL suggests, so for example when you complete a change request you can resolve the underlying problem and then all the incidents that related to that problem.”
Using the data in the easily customised reports, Salt has been able to set team targets and improve working practices, enabling the teams to work more effectively.
“Before Supportworks ITSM we had only about 60 percent success on meeting our SLAs. Now we are meeting them at levels of 92 percent. This of course has a direct benefit to the business – time literally means money when you charge by the hour. If a partner’s productivity is hampered for a few hours that can represent, say, up to a thousand pounds worth of loss of time recording. Speed is vital to support their profitability,” says Salt.
The IT team is also using it for change management. Staff update their own change requests and the reports are generated automatically. Using it has reduced the administration involved and it is easier to update the changes.
Reports on recorded issues have also enabled the IT team to identify common problems and incidents and identify patterns. The team regularly updates the knowledgebase with notes and personal research, building a central repository that all IT staff can then tap into. Individuals are assigned a half day a week to write up notes and input the data, to ensure that information is captured centrally and is not lost as personnel move on.
Notes on problem management are ‘blogged’ in the call diary so that different members of the IT team can easily follow up the history of a problem and different approaches that have been tried. Salt is also impressed with Hornbill’s online user forum. “Hornbill’s Support Forum is a great facility – people can post questions, share information, experiences and ways of working – almost like Facebook. It is a great way to show how the system is being used as a tool and how we can continually improve what we do.”
The system’s usability has been invaluable according to Salt, who is in no doubt that the recent relocation to a flagship eight story building was managed smoothly with its help.
The IT team knew that during the first week in the new building the number of support calls would be high. They created a temporary enterprise-wide service desk, manned by the training team who took calls on any move issues, whether facilities, IT, training or other support issues. Salt trained the ‘front-line’ on Supportworks ITSM, which he claims took “no more than ten minutes to get them going”.
The IT department itself was split up into small teams distributed across each of the eight floors, with an escalation team kept centralised so that they could deal with issues remotely or be deployed to where they were needed most.
Looking to the future, Halliwells plans to make full use of its new ITSM sytem for asset management to replace the current manual system for tracking company assets including Blackberrys and mobile phones, and then beyond to extensive configuration management of its IT environment.
“It has surpassed our expectations – it is a great service desk and IT management tool. Its flexibility has really enabled us to increase our efficiency as to how we track, manage and resolve calls. Now we are able to identify issues and problems to help us meet our SLAs. There is no doubt that we have demonstrated the value of IT to the business and our customer satisfaction has certainly increased,” concludes Salt.
Business benefits
• Call logging enables calls to be assigned teams and prioritised.
• Easy-to-use screens with call history and user photos improve call handling and customer satisfaction.
• Adoption of ITIL has introduced new efficient working practices.
• Reports highlight and identify common problems and issues.
• Allocation of resources and priorities enable SLAs to be met.
• Improved resolution of calls/meeting SLAs reduced fix times and increased user productivity.
Halliwells’ IT department retains top award
A host of Hornbill customers in the legal sector were recognised at the Legal Technology Awards 2009. Halliwells was named City/National IT Team of the Year for the second year running, claiming its success was greatly assisted by implementing Supportworks as part of its IT strategy. The company won the accolade for a number of new systems developed and in addition to the Team win, was Highly Commended in both the City/National IT Director category and Most Client Focused Law Firm.
The Legal Technology Awards are presented in association with the Legal Technology Journal and recognise and celebrate excellence in the provision and implementation of technology solutions for the benefit of legal practice. John Salt, head of IT Service at Halliwells commented: “We had a two-part strategy for 2008, and Hornbill’s Supportworks was of central importance to the ‘service optimisation’ part. In particular our Continual Service Improvement programme relies on the powerful way we can generate metrics from the data within Supportworks. Thanks to the ease with which it supports our processes, all the records (such as incidents, problems and changes) get entered, so those metrics come to life. We’re the first to achieve City/National IT Team of the Year for two years running and Supportworks’ role has been crucial to both years. We would like to commend Hornbill for making such a good product and providing the service to support us.”
