What have IT professionals been saying about their IT service management tools in 2017?
In the review excerpts below, IT Central Station users share how their companies have benefited from their IT service management software, and describe which of their pain points have been solved.
Users discuss the following solutions:
VictorOps: Valuable Features
A Cloud Operations Manager at a Software R&D company with 1,001-5,000 employees, discusses the time-saving abilities that VictorOps facilitates:
“The most valuable feature of the product is how they allow you to do the scheduling compared to the other companies. I switched from PagerDuty to VictorOps because the time that it would take for me to create a full-on schedule for a single item would be anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and a half in PagerDuty. That same schedule takes me no more than ten minutes in VictorOps.
That’s because, with VictorOps, you’re in a single-pane window to create that calendar or that schedule, compared to PagerDuty where, once you set up a single session, you have to go back and set up another session, and that's your escalation policy.”
VictorOps: Room for Improvement
Josef Stasa, ICT Services Manager at a Software R&D company with 1,001-5,000 employees, describes his paint points with VictorOps:
“One thing which we would like is an improvement to the history log on the main page. There is some history, and I think you can filter it, but the filtering options are not sufficient for us. We would like to have more options. You can find some history records for the previous two or three days, but you cannot dig into them.”
ServiceNow: Valuable Features
“From my standpoint, it's the process flexibility”, writes an IT Support professional at an insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees.
He explains that “ServiceNow was needed to get everyone working the same way through tickets and requests. The ability to have something consistently flexible enough for us to put some structure in and get folks all working the same way across multiple departments, but still have the flexibility for them to feel like they're getting what they want when they're getting what we want.”
ServiceNow: Room for Improvement
A Performance Analyst at an insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees describes his pain points with ServiceNow’s resource management:
“From what I have heard, and what I've seen thus far, resource management needs to be a little tighter. We're running performance models around capacity planning. We need to know: How many resources are in play? How many hours are they actually working? What's the requirement for all those resources on those different pieces? How does that lay against what we're allocating?”
Zendesk: Valuable Features
“The ease of use and great flexibility is awesome”, writes Carsten Hovisch Falborg, Zendesk Specialist at a tech services company with 51-200 employees.Hovisch Falborg, Zendesk Specialist at a tech services company with 51-200 employees.
“Also, as an agent, it's the macros and the tight integration with the Help Center”, continues Falborg. “As an administrator, it's more how easy it is to configure the workflows and the apps framework.”
Lastly, he adds, “It has lifted our customer service! Not only can we reply faster, we are more accurate on multiple channels and we get a lot of data from the system that we can use to become even better!”
Zendesk: Room for Improvement
“It would be good to be able to edit”, writes Marina Abarca-Hislop, a Customer Support/Retail Division at a Consumer Goods with 501-1,000 employees.
She elaborates that “unfortunately, Zendesk believes that the integrity of a ticket and its comments are important. That when either party reads comments on tickets, they should be able to trust the content is unaltered from its original context.
As per Zendesk, they feel it does not fit in with the direction and vision they have for Zendesk...Creating triggers is complicated and confusing.”
BMC Remedy: Valuable Features
Pascale Sterrett, Sr. BMC Remedy Lead Developer (PM) at a transportation company, discusses the value of BMC Remedy’s flexibility:
“The main valuable feature is the flexibility of the product -- the ability to be able to make it do almost anything we need it to do to adjust to our business needs and to do it very quickly. The time to deliver a finished product is fast.”
BMC Remedy: Room for Improvement
Joe Caropepe, Applications Support at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees, shares his pain points with BMC Remedy:
“There are two areas where I think improvements could be made; web support of custom applications and upgrades. BMC provides a couple of modern web interfaces with SmartIT and MyIT, but these are limited to fronting their own (ITSM) applications.”
HPE Service Manager: Valuable Features
A Chief Architect at a government agency with 10,001+ employees shares:
“We can have all our requests and incidents registered in one system. We have about 250 employees in the IT department and we have one system. We don't have to email each other and we are sitting in a geographically large company, in many departments, and in many hospitals. So it's great that we just have one system and we don't have to call or drive to each other. That's the most important thing.”
HPE Service Manager: Room for Improvement
“In the release that we currently have, the biggest challenge was reporting”, shares a Lead Channels Database Administrator and Way4 System Administrator at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees.
“It didn't have the reports that we needed out of the box. In fact, it didn’t have reports at all out of the box. It was a nightmare. You need to use Crystal Reports to customize your reporting.”
He then elaborates on how HPE could improve the reporting feature(s):
“In the next release, I want Service Manager to have its own reports. Straight out of the box, click a button and you get the report you want. I'm sure that with all the implementations that have been done, there must be some common reports which have been used.”
CA Service Desk Manager: Valuable Features
“This product has so many adjustment possibilities for many different clients”, writes William Teixeira, Data Administrator at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees.
“One of the features of this product is to elevate the customer experience. Due to the constantly increasing needs of the customers' experience, we always have to make changes in the way we are working to provide satisfaction to our clients. Thus, this application has many thousands of ways to do that.”
CA Service Desk Manager: Room for Improvement
Zel Louise Van Den Heever, Development Manager at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees, discusses the transition from the old employee interface to USS:
“With the transition from the old employee interface to USS, certain functions were not brought over, such as the properties. They should have paid more attention to the features that were available and what was brought over.”
Read more of the latest IT service management reviews from 2017 on IT Central Station.
Quite an informative piece and useful reviews on ITSM.