This project was presented to the Director of IT Services, Arapahoe County, CO as a part of my Fellowship with Coding It Forward
Project Overview:
Client: IT Department, Arapahoe County (Colorado)
Business Needs:
- Consolidation of IT service catalog from multiple sources
- Improved interdepartmental communication strategies:
a. Fewer touch points between software purchase requester and approver
b. Easier access for all employees to access IT service catalog and associated admin.
User Story:
As an employee of the IT department of Arapahoe County (CO), I want to be able to approve/deny the purchase of SaaS licenses without needing to scan the organization's database manually.
To do this, I need access to a single, consolidated database/service portfolio within my ITSM software (IT service management). This database should reflect changes made by any member of the organization.
My Role:
As the product manager fellow, I consolidated and deduplicated a list of 800+ IT services from 15+ artifacts (Excel sheets, invoice records, and Word documents) into a single database (Airtable).
Additionally, I conducted user interviews to assess user needs, construct a user story, and identify pain points and inefficiencies in business processes.
Methodology:
8 users from multiple IT divisions were interviewed to understand the facilitating factors and pain points in (i) adding a new service to their portfolio and associated records, and (ii) discontinuing an existing service, including ending any enterprise contracts and removing related artifacts from the county's IT servers.
Our interviewees comprised users who owned/accessed different parts of the ITSM software -- including business analysts, server managers, IT HelpDesk managers, and application managers.
Findings:
I consolidated my findings into a single affinity map:
My recommendations:
- Overall, the IT department's portfolio requires deliberate pruning to eliminate 300+ applications and services whose functions are identical to a different SaaS product.
- Alternatively, products whose function is subsumed in a larger enterprise software product should be removed from the county's service portfolio.
- To achieve this goal, the IT department must create a set of standardized software product categories that allow users to assess whether a new product warrants acquisition.
- IT leadership should collaborate with other county departments to create standardized nomenclature for different IT service groups. This move will minimize the number of clicks between a county worker requesting a new purchase, and an IT employee assessing and responding to such a request.
For more information on this project, you can check out my full slides on GitHub: https://github.com/codingitforward/fellowship2023/blob/main/Ishika_Ray.pdf