Thirdera upgrades Yarra Valley Water's ServiceNow environment

Global pure-play ServiceNow partner Thirdera, through its Australian acquisition Service Line Solutions (SLS), upgraded utility Yarra Valley Water’s ServiceNow environment to adapt to the changing workplace.

The utility (YVW) brought in upgrades to overhaul its workplace practices to work around the COVID-19 pandemic, and its IT systems to consolidate some 20 applications into a single platform.

Thirdera deployed ServiceNow Workplace Service Delivery and IntegrationHub over a six-week period to address those needs, through digitising desk reservations and installing a centralised portal for the apps.

“Yarra Valley Water had implemented a few other ServiceNow modules, so when the organisation wanted to manage their employees returning to work, it was looking for a product that could do the job as part of its existing investment in ServiceNow,” Thirdera vice president of consulting and operations and SLS co-founder Girish Ramkrishnani said.

“The COVID-19 response product was still new at the time, so we decided to run a four-week proof of concept (POC) to see if it worked for Yarra Valley Water. ServiceNow came to the party by responding to the requirements and changing or adopting product enhancements very quickly to keep up with the constantly changing requirements of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Ramkrishnani said the POC was successful enough to allow Thirdera to open up YVW’s other areas of workplace service delivery.

The solution introduced employee registration, approvals and movement monitoring through the platform’s desk reservation system, with features like mapping the whole office space and a way finder function.

Ramkrishnani added that YVW, as a government-owned entity, also had a dedicated COVID-19 response team liaising with Thirdera on the project, ensuring all parties were updated with the changing requirements.

“Each week we were expecting the project to change, where something we did would have to be scrapped whenever the requirements would change,” Ramkrishnani said. “But we responded to all those in a very agile fashion and still delivered within eight weeks.”

YVW senior IT service delivery manager Kowsikaraman Pattabiraman said, “With changing health guidelines, we had to quickly adopt a solution that employees could easily use when we started returning to the office. ServiceNow enabled us to achieve this.”

Following the Workplace Service Delivery deployment, Thirdera brought in ServiceNow’s IT service management (ITSM), IT operations management and IT asset management products to integrate YVW’s 20-plus applications, as well as automate the organisation’s IT service delivery and measure performance in real-time.

The portal replaced a Cherwell-based system, which took longer to implement changes and lacked self-service capabilities.

The ITSM helped improve YVW’s incident request monitoring and access analytics on ticket requests and response times and reduce employee onboarding time from hours to minutes. The ITOM meanwhile provided more visibility on insights across YVW’s infrastructure to maintain service health, and to optimise service delivery and spend.

Yarra Valley Water general manager for service futures Glenn Wilson said, “We saw ServiceNow as our strategic partner rather than just a service management provider.”