Wednesday, 11 December 2013

Choosing the Right ITSM Tool


In the noble and unending battle to save the world form shonky IT Service Management  , your ITSM tool can be either your soundest ally or your greatest nemesis. Your Han Solo or your Darth Vader, your Sancho Panza or your windmill, your Queequeg or Moby Dick or your, well… you get the picture.

Chances are, if you’re reading this, that your current system falls into the ‘nemesis’ category, or your relationship with your current system or vendor is no longer as rosy as it used to be, and you’re taking a look around to see what else is out there.

Which, inevitably, means dealing with sales people.  Now, I have friends, and some family, who work in sales. Now, I understand; it’s a job that needs doing, and someone needs to do it, just like e-coli bacteria are needed to maintain a healthy gastro intestinal system. All the same though, I’d rather reduce my direct contact with both to the bare minimum.

One of the first tired old lines a sales rep is likely to trot out is that their product is Pink Verified for all 10 + ITIL processes. (YAWN! Show me one that isn’t). Next they’ll tell you that you can roll it out to your facilities and HR departments and bandy about Americanism’s like ‘onboarding’.  These are just more good things to add to an already long list tactics sales people employ that really piss me off ( see my post  ‘tactics sales people employ that really piss me off’ for more). I know they’re just trying to do their jobs in the cut throat market, but there has to be a better way for them to operate, and people need to tell them that.

Gartner Magic Quadrant: IT Service Management  Tools
Unless you’re just looking for a basic ticketing system, and not a full-on ITSM suite, it’s not really worth considering a toolset whose developers haven’t bothered to go through the process of getting their system verified by Pink Elephant as being compliant in at least the core ITIL processes, or that don’t warrant a rating in the Gartner Magic Quadrant report for IT Service Support Management Tools. You can find details of the most recent evaluations here.
The long and the short of it is that ALL PROPER ITSM PRODUCTS DO EXACTLY THE SAME THING.  (see above for what qualifies an application as a ‘proper ITSM’ application. What you need to know is what makes one a better product for your environment for you than others?
Once you’ve checked out the products that are Pink Verified in the processes you plan on using, and or appear in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant Report, it comes down to three key  criteria:

1.       Cost
2.       Ease of configurability
3.       Partnerships
Cost:
You can count on the fact that almost every sales person you speak to will try do everything in their power  to avoid giving you the price up front.  Sharks. The lot of them.  It’s also almost inevitable that this is the one piece of information you absolutely, unequivocally need to decide if a products a contender for you.  It doesn’t matter if their product comes ‘round to your house, cooks you breakfast and then drives you to work every morning if your budget doesn’t stretch to the price tag on their application.  The way to get them  to give this to up front is to email them your requirements ( real requirements, like how many licences you need, if you want them to host it, and how much they charge for implementation.  Requirements  like ‘enhanced business process automation’ , ‘increased efficiency’, ‘ITIL alignment’, ‘improved customer satisfaction’ are red herrings. Why would you even be looking at their products if it couldn’t deliver these things’) Be clear that you can’t engage with you further until you have an indicative cost. Don’t speak to them on the phone, and bar their demo team from your premises until you have the figures.
If you’re lucky, you work for a company that’s got a clear IT  strategy and will pay head when you you start talking about return on investment, and you may be able to look at systems that cost more upfront, but deliver cost benefits after a few years.IF not, you’re probably best of looking at a SAAS option that may not cost as much up front, but will probably end up costing more over a five year period.
Scale is also key here. An IT Department upwards of 50 employees is going to fork out a massive amount in licensing anyway, so paying to host the application in house would only represent a small additional cost.
Hidden Costs:
You need to be absolutely clear about what the configuration you are paying for will do out of the box.  You don’t want to be paying for additional modules or consultancy fees straight after you’ve gone live in order to get the application you thought you were going to get after you saw the demo. You also don’t want to be shelling out extra for a test/sandpit environment.
Ease of Configurability:
Here’s a real clincher.  I’ve recently had the misfortune to work with a product that represented good value for money when it was implemented.  The problems was that if didn’t have a few code jockeys sitting around bone idle that you could set to work every time you wanted to implement a new business process, your tool would gradually get out of step with the way you were working. Almost any significant change to the system required a degree of coding. The company reps always trotted out the fact that their product was used internally by the Microsoft internal service desk.  Anyone that’s ever had the misfortune of dealing with MS support can vouch for the fact being associated with the support arm of Microsoft is nothing to brag about. They also skirt around the fact that MS have an army of coding geniuses available to build their processes for them.
IF you’re a Service Desk manager or team leader, the chances are you’re going to be the one tasked with system administration.  As if you don’t already have enough to do. Your ITSM tool is there to make your life easier, and if you’re up to your elbows in its guts trying to get it to do what you want all the time, then you’re not going to reap its benefits.
Once you ‘ve specced out a process, documented how it’s going to work and got all the relevant stakeholders to agree to it, you want to be able to build it into your ITSM tool as quickly as easily as possible.
Do yourself a favour, and get whoever’s doing the demo for you to show you how they would go about setting up a new process within the application. There’s no reason in this day and age why any decent ITSM tool shouldn’t to do most of what you require pretty much straight out of the box.
Partnerships:
If you’re in service delivery you know how important client\customer relationships are, so look for a vendor that places customer relationships at the centre of their business model.
A few years back I worked with a product that isn’t particularly big in the UK, but offered good value for money.
The system was in place when I joined, but luckily the reseller was small and took really good care of its clients. The benefits we were able to realise for the business because of the ongoing support and brilliant relationship management we had with the vendor far outstripped, in my opinion the benefits we would have reaped from a more expensive ultra deluxe ITSM product with poorer vendor support .
Be realistic about your needs. Sure, that salesman’s going to rabbit on about the 11 ITIL processes, but how many to you actually have implemented in your environment, and how many more are you likely to take on during the lifecycle of your product? That products isn’t  going to create service improvement plans and implement a CMDB for you while you’re on your lunch break. The temptation to blow the budget on the most expensive system around is always going to be there, but unless you have the processes and procedures in place to take advantage of all the completed level of sophistication of the application, you’re going to be paying for functionality you don’t use.
Most importantly, don’t rush into any decision. You’re going to be shelling out a lot of money for a decent application, and it’ll be with your department for years, and the last thing you want to be doing each day at work is battling Darth Vader when you could be hanging out in the Mos Eisley Cantina with Han.

Wednesday, 4 December 2013

SharePoint Conditional Formatting Error on Lookup or Calculated Field

My missus recently dismissed my blogging endeavours as 'boring geek stuff'. Well, she's going to eat her fucking hat when she gets a look at this beauty...
One of our SharePoint chefs at the office was came up against a brick wall earlier to today when trying to apply some conditional formatting to rows in a SharePoint list. He was trying to colour code rows depending on the value in the 'location' column in any row. Simple, everyday stuff.
After looking at the field he was referencing when writing the condition criteria, yours truly noticed that the field in question was in fact a lookup field referencing another list.
This means that while the condition was set to look for a value of 'x', SharePoint was also getting back the numerical values that made up the ID of the lookup item in the master list when querying that field.
You'd expect that changing the comparison part of the clause to 'contains'  instead of 'equals' would sort that out. And quite frankly I looked like a right dick when I told everyone it would, and then in fact it didn't.

The solution that did work was:
  1. In SharePoint: Create another column, with a 'single line of text' field.
  2. In SharePoint Designer: Create a workflow to copy the the text from the lookup column to the new column when a new entry is created.
  3. In SharePoint Designer, open the list and the view you want to apply the formatting to, and ammend your existing conditional formatting entry to  reference the newly created column.
  4. Hide either one of the duplicate columns fron the view you're working on.
Hope that helps someone out there.

Tuesday, 26 November 2013

My IT Heroes: Part I



Why write about my IT Heroes? Somebody has to dammit. Because my IT Heroes aren’t the the Linus Torvalds, Tim Berners Lees, Bill Gates' or Steve Jobs' of this world. No sir!

My IT Heroes are those dedicated, tireless, unsung heroes who spend every spare minute of their lives, posting solutions, contributing to forums and updating their blogs for the benefit of those of us too lazy, slow witted or just too plain old incompetent to figure things out for ourselves. Most importantly, they’re people who share their expertise for free; when it’s quite evident they could be charging for it. They’re the sort of people who’ve got me out of more than a handful of sticky situations where I’ve contemplated hanging up my IT hat, getting a paper route and moving back in with my parents.
Pinal Dave: IT Hero, Legend

First and foremost amongst these, has to be, in my opinion, the irrepressible, unsurpassable,
unbelievable, unrivalled SQL Authority: Pinal Dave.
Now, I love SQL. Who doesn't? But no one loves SQL like Pinal Dave loves SQL. And you can take that to the bank, bucko.

According to his online resume, Pinal Dave (pronounced ‘Pinul Daway’), ‘has written over 2200 articles on the subject on his blog at http://blog.sqlauthority.com. Along with 8+ years of hands on experience he holds a Masters of Science degree and a number of certifications, including MCTS, MCDBA and MCAD (.NET). He is co-author of three SQL Server books -SQL Server Programming, SQL Wait Stats and SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers. His past work experiences include Technology Evangelist at Microsoft and Sr. Consultant at SolidQ. Prior to joining Microsoft he was awarded Microsoft MVP award for three continuous years for his contribution in the community.’

But Pinal's work is not just a digital paean to relational databases and all their splendour, worthy as that may be an exercise in itself. First and foremost, Pinal’s site is a community asset and go-to place for those of us lacking his mad skills on the SQL front.

By his own admission he started his blog as a repository for scripts and solutions he was working on, and only found out later that these where visible to others on the net. Spurred on by unexpected feedback on a SQL script he was working on, Pinal has over the subsequent seven years, gone on to co-author 10 books on the subject. Pinal's site is like an Aladdin's cave of scripts, solutions levels of enthusiasm for his subject matter that make you want to get out there and build SQL scripts all day long.

Its people like Pinal who remind you that you're not just someone toiling away in an industry or sector, but that you're part of a community of people who are - by and large - creative, intelligent, filled with curiosity and dedicated to solving problems and fixing things. The SQL Authority blog epitomises the sort of thing that great about the net, community building, collaboration, knowledge sharing. The sort of thing that don’t get much attention from the media because it’s not about making a gazillion bucks, or wildly sensationalist.

In a recent post celebrating the seventh anniversary of his blog, Pinal thanked everyone who had visited his site and made it such a success over the years. No Pinal Dave. THANK YOU.

Wednesday, 20 November 2013

White Paper Service Desk Excellence Contribution (or, 'How I Failed to Win the Nobel Prize')

I was recently approached to contribute to an industry White Paper on Service Desk Excellence in the UK. Not quite as prestigious as being awarded the Nobel Prize, I know. But it was nice to have my opinion elevated to the same level as the folks at NTT Data, the Rank Group, 365 and O2, amongst others.

The paper was aimed gathering information about what makes an effective and excellent Service Desk, with a particular focus on:
  • Individuality & Uniqueness
  • Motivation & Reward
  • Appraisal & Staff Satisfaction
  • Development and Progression
  • Culture & Environment
  • Communication & Customer Satisfaction.
So, if you're interested in getting a snapshot what some of industry leaders are doing to drive excellence, innovation and development within their Service Desk environments, look no further.

You can access the White Paper on Service Desk Excellence via this link.

Enjoy!

Friday, 18 October 2013

Copying Data Between SharePoint Lists

Why would you need to do this you ask? You just never know. For a real world example where this came in handy, see the following post: Hiding List Data from Unauthorised Users

In SharePoint Designer, on the site you list resides in, click on 'workflows' and choose list you want to copy from from the 'list workflow'  drop down list. Once you have named the workflow saved it, click on the 'edit workflow' option, and choose 'Copy List Item' from the list of available actions.


















Choose the option to copy the current item to the list you want to copy to, as per the screenshot below.


Next, go back to the settings page for that workflow and tick the 'start workflow automatically when an item is created' box.

Next save a publish your workflow.

Test the workflow by creating a new item in your first list. Next, go to your second list and check that the item has been copied across to this list.

Hiding List Data From Unauthorised Sharepoint Users

We recently implemented a Share Point list for managing IT Purchase requests, and one of the requirements was, understandably, that the person requesting the item could not see all the purchasing information (supplier, quotes etc.) that the office administrator needed to add to the list.

Although you can create different views of a form for submitting and editing a list item, there's no out of the box option for restricting different views of a form or list to different users or groups.
The solution we implemented, which works pretty well, was to create two separate lists and copy the information between the two.

So, in this scenario, we wanted to enable staff to request a quote for additional IT equipment not supplied as part of our standard service offerings (let's say for instance, a 40inch monitor for a meeting room, or a high-end MacBook). Once the quote had been obtained, and the details where entered into the list, an approval workflow would kick in, sending an email to the relevant budget holder and an appropriate person in IT to approve or reject the purchase, and then email the requestor and the person responsible for IT purchasing of the outcome.

End to End Process:
  • The person filling out the form fill in the details of their request and adds a budget holder and recipient for whatever item they are requesting, or marks themselves as the budget holder and/or recipient. Alternatively, if you want force any request to be authorised by someone's manager, you can use the 'find manager' action within the SharePoint Designer workflow to kick of the approval process with them. This depends on your Active Directory being up to date, and also assumes that a budget holder or senior member of staff will never request something for themselves.
  • The recipient and budget holder details are automatically populated with the details of the person filling out the form (see Anne Stenberg's incredibly helpful blog here for instructions on doing this). These fields are hidden from view, unless the person filling out the form chooses selects ‘no’ from the ‘Are you the intended recipient?’ drop down and/or ‘no’ form the ‘Are you authorised to make purchases for your team or department?’ drop down.
  • The recipient is directed to a holding page here once they have completed the form. They also get an email confirming their submission.
  • An email is then generated to the IT Administrator asking them to get a quote from a supplier. The workflow pauses until the ‘supplier’ field has been filled in.
  • Once the quote details have been filled in, an email is sent to the budget holder name on the form.
  • If the budget holder rejects the quote, the process stops there. If the budget holder approves the quote, an email is sent to the Head of IT for approval. If the Head of IT rejects the quote, an email is sent to the budget holder informing them of this, and the process stops there.
  • If the someone within the IT Approvers group approves the quote, an email is sent the budget holder, and another to the IT Administrator telling them to raise a purchase order.

The Setup:
  • Create a list that people will submit their requests to.
  • Create a second list in the same site, with field names and types exactly matching the first list. To this list you can add the additional field that you want to hide from people submitting to the first list.
  • Customise your forms in InfoPath.
  • Create a workflow on the the first list to copy the details across to the second list, and email the person submitting their request to let them know it's been received and is being actioned.
  • Create an approval workflow with the budget holder and the IT Approvers group.
  • Update the list view in SharePoint Designer.

Thursday, 17 October 2013

This workflow resides in a document library that is not trusted

There's a first time for everything, and after extensive testing on an list requiring approval from within Outlook, one of our testers got the following message: 'This workflow resides in a document library that is not trusted'. We tried all the obvious things, adding the site to the 'Trusted Sites' section in IE, checking browser settings/ versions etc. and just couldn't get the bottom of it. The fact that the tester was working on a pretty non standard PC build for our organisation ( Windows 8, Office 2013, IE10) turned out to be a little bit of a red herring. The solution that got us there in the end was to out the full URL into trusted sites ( i.e: http://sitename.domain.com) instead of just that site URL (i.e. http://sitename.com) .

Various forums had unresolved threads on this topic, so thought it would be worth putting out there. You just never know.

Thursday, 3 October 2013

Ending a Sharepoint Workflow on First Rejection:


I' m just going to come right out and say it: SharePoint's out the box approval process leaves a lot to be desired. There, let the chips fall wherever the hell they will.
They're not customisable, and the emails they send out to approvers and the person kicking off a workflow are vague and obscure at best, and completely meaningless to anyone not familiar with SharePoint.
Luckily, SharePoint designer provides a pretty user friendly interface creating workflows that can be customised to meet most of your requirements. For a primer on pimping a basic SharePoint workflow, it's pretty difficult to beat Bobby Chang's post on nothingbutsharepoint.com
All very good, the only problem I had after setting up my first workflow following Bobby's method, was that I wanted any person reviewing the item for approval to be able to reject it, and  for that to end the worflow, rather than requiring everyone to complete the workflow before its status moved from 'in progress' to 'rejected'.
To achieve this, add an action ahead of the approvals process (using the set 'workflow variable' option from the actions dropdown' list)  to set 'cancelonrejection' variable to 'yes', as in the screenshot below