Many organisations find themselves in the midst of a large ITSM tool migration, for example from older versions of Remedy to ServiceNow.
We often help clients migrate from legacy ITSM tools to modern ITSM tools, which provide a broader range of capabilities. We would like to offer the following words of advice to prevent IT teams from making the mistakes we commonly see.
- Manage the migration as a project. Capture requirements and configure against these. Track and report progress
- Attempt to stick to “out of the box” configuration, as opposed to customisation of the tool but be careful as an out of the box implementation may not always be possible.
- Appoint a product owner and initiate a “backlog” of enhancement requests. Establish a governance model to manage all requests, to maintain system integrity
- Do not attempt to migrate current working practices from the legacy tool to the new one. This practice often results in customisation of the new ITSM and a failure to capitalise on the capabilities of the new tool.
- Develop a robust testing plan which covers unit test, system test, integration test, performance test and penetration testing.
- Procure a managed service contract to bring specialist skills to the process of tool configuration
- Seek to maximise the capabilities of the tool over time. Maintain a roadmap of strategic improvement to the tool.
We hope this advice helps you.
Take a look at more of our ITSM tool selection articles, especially our recent ITSM Cutover approach article.