Capital Markets Powerhouse Makes the Transition from ServiceNow to Jira Service Management in Just 2 Months.

The Result

• 80% Reduction in Costs
• High user satisfactionŠ
• A scalable platform

Need for innovation requiring modern ITSM solution

The last few years have seen rapid changes to the competitive landscape for securities exchanges. Increased competition and cyclical downturns have applied pressure to this industry’s profitability. Increasingly, exchanges react with mergers to widen their business model and expand their operations beyond national boundaries.

This changing landscape led to increased pressure on our client’s IT department, which had to continually innovate to keep up with the competition – while adapting to a shifting regulatory and political landscape and integrating a regular stream of international acquisitions.

This client had been using ServiceNow as its central ITSM platform for several years, but the platform required a continuous and significant investment in day-to-day maintenance. This maintenance took up precious time that could be better spent on strategic initiatives. As the company acquired new international subsidiaries and its processes evolved, the tool’s lack of adaptability impeded the department’s ability to execute.

Successfully execute an 8-month transformation in just 2 months

Following a tendering exercise, Jira Service Management was selected as the new ITSM platform. It was chosen primarily because of its adaptability, ease of maintenance, and quick time-to-value. Valiantys was chosen as the implementation partner.

Time was, however, of the essence; there were only a few weeks left until the expiration of the current platform’s license. The joint project team between Valiantys and the client quickly established a plan to compress the typical 8-month transition into just two months.

Adding to this challenge, the client required that all historical ticket and asset data be migrated, that integrations be enabled with Nagios, Redmine, and Workday, and that several ITIL processes be refreshed. The ITIL processes in scope were:

• Incident Management
• Problem Management
• Service Request Management
• Knowledge Management
• Risk Management
• Asset Management & CMDB

A pragmatic and collaborative operation

The client and Valiantys agreed on an extremely pragmatic approach: while not everything would be perfect by launch, by dividing the work across multiple streams working in parallel, the transition could be completed by the deadline.

Some of the early decisions which made a significant contribution to the project’s success included:

• Careful onboarding of the relevant teams
• A pragmatic approach to renovating processes
• Collaborative building & testing
• Emphasis on data management over data migration
• Multi-tiered communication plan for the project team, IT, and the wider business
• Early focus on user adoption

The most challenging part of the project was data migration, with 15,000 assets, 200,000 tickets, and 1,300 knowledge base records.

Ultimately, a highly collaborative relationship between partner and client made the difference, allowing for completion from discovery to production in 8 weeks. Strong project management from Valiantys, strong executive sponsorship from the client, and proactive stakeholder management from both were key to the successful delivery.

Reduced cost, Increased agility

• Successful migration of 500 agents from ServiceNow to Jira Service Desk in 2 months. All previous functionality and data were transferred.
• 80% reduction in 3-year Total Cost of Ownership, with a more modern and flexible solution that can grow as needed.
• High levels of user satisfaction, thanks to efficient change management and training.
• A scalable platform that can be expanded to provide process automation to teams across the business.

What’s next

The next step is replacing the Redmine issue-tracking tool, which will provide DevOps process integration and end-to-end value stream visibility.