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Client overview
The Company is a major provider of cloud infrastructure and application virtualisation solutions. It effects digital transformations, infrastructure enhancements, and business mobility improvements for customers across the globe. With over $7 billion in annual revenue, the Company is a major player in the worldwide solutions marketplace.
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The Company was in the process of replacing its existing Helpzilla ticketing system and related processes with the state-of-the-art ServiceNow IT service management system.
ServiceNow offers a single point of contact for all of the Company’s IT, human resources, finance, technical operations, and REW service requests. It also provides advanced features such as approvals, notifications, and workflows. These assist in reducing the time needed to resolve tickets, thereby increasing customer satisfaction.
Upgrading the Service Management System
However, the Company lacked the right domain knowledge to conduct proper testing of the new application. ServiceNow would have to serve 1200 groups across the globe, and would have to be rigorously tested in collaboration with each group owner. The magnitude of this effort led the Company to seek assistance from an outside testing provider.
At the time of the ServiceNow migration, Prolifics was already one of the Company’s trusted partners. We had previously supported the Company by providing testing for several other projects. The Company selected Prolifics to perform the comprehensive testing it required based on our end-to-end knowledge of the Company’s business processes, combined with its proven expertise and Accelerators.
Instituting the Right Testing Solution
Though Prolifics was also new to the ServiceNow system, we were able to quickly compile a team with the needed expertise—including six functional testing and automation resources from Prolifics and one representative from the Company. This team instituted a three-month Rapid Fix program that focused on quickly adding enhancements and remediating issues. The six-phase project encompassed requirement gathering and analysis, design, implementation and coding, testing, deployment, and maintenance.
The project presented several challenges, including:
Tight testing timelines and short delivery cycle: The Prolifics team worked closely with the Company’s project team to understand and prioritise the Company’s requirements so changes could be delivered on short notice and at a high level of quality. Quality Assurance testing was done in parallel to unit testing, helping ensure that defects were detected early in the cycle.
Regular Master Service Level data updates: This data set contains critical information relating to the Company’s services and provides the mapping between catalogue and service items. The team used version controlling to track the changes to this data and developed an automated case creation script that is able to run different data combinations using a parameterisation technique. This reduced the amount of manual effort needed.
Frequent live upgrades that needed to be tested with minimal downtime: We prioritised the scripts required to cover end-to-end flow. These were automated and executed for all live upgrades, minimising effort and downtime.
The Prolifics team produced 11 continuous releases, at times supporting releases that occurred every 15 days. 143 total defects were logged and resolved. 101 user requirements were deployed to production. In parallel to these releases, the Prolifics team also supported the Company’s automation team with the knowledge transfer and suggestions needed to create a regression testing suite. Moving forward, a roadmap of continuous projects will keep the Prolifics testing team busy further improving the Company’s infrastructure.
The result of the project is a ServiceNow portal that has been thoroughly tested for quality and stability. The benefits it provides to the Company include:
- Higher ticket logging rates, allowing for the resolution of more issues
- Drastic reduction of SLA for ticket closing
- Increased ticket workflow transparency to the end user
- Greater self-service capability through enhanced knowledge
- Increased accuracy by gathering complete information at point of entry
- Improved quality of service by implementing standardised processes
- Accelerated response times driven by ServiceNow Service Level Agreements
- Enhanced customer satisfaction
This successful testing project delivered on its objectives, including its scope, schedule, budget, and quality. Prolifics completed the project on time and on budget while maintaining the high standards the Company had come to expect.
“Thanks to the QA team...All those late night calls and testing–finding new production issues that we didn’t even know existed! Your effort is much appreciated by us all.”
—Company Representative
