Operations Service Management: Transforming Campus Through Digital Workflows
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by Steve Church
With campus roaring back to life amid back-to-back Commencements, Reunions, and special events, HBS IT and Operations have been partnering closely behind the scenes to ensure these activities go off without a hitch. However, it’s not just major campus events that bring these departments together—they collaborate every day on finding new ways to support the HBS community. At the heart of this collaboration? An innovative service management platform designed by Operations and IT to lay the digital foundation for teams to respond to evolving needs on campus and build on digital transformation efforts across the School. What Is Operations Service Management? Built in ServiceNow, the platform that Operations and IT use to manage community requests, the Service Management module provides a modern, unified, and transparent system for Operations teams to support the community. “We receive requests from the community via Service Management and then manage and prioritize that work so we can assign it to the right resource as fast and efficiently as possible,” described John O’Connor, senior director of administrative services for Operations. Service Management’s implementation stems from years of collaborative innovation between Operations and IT. An earlier example of this partnership was developing the HBS Test Kit & PPE Supply Tracker in October 2020, which became an essential inventory management tool for Operations to support the School’s COVID-19 response. This paved the way for new automated workflows to boost campus activities, which eventually grew into the Service Management platform. “This is the product of hundreds of hours of experimentation and partnership,” said Xolani Ngwenya, senior director, IT Planning and Service Delivery. “It’s been a very interesting and rewarding journey to see how Operations can leverage tools traditionally used by IT to solve business problems across campus.” Under the Hood of Service Management So, what exactly happens within Service Management when you place a request? Upon receipt, the system generates a ticket and routes it to the appropriate Operations dispatch group—Facilities, Custodial, Security, Operational Support Services, etc.—who then assigns the task to the appropriate team members and vendors. Users receive regular automated updates throughout the process.  All of this happens from a single point of entry via the Operations Service Request portal, where community members can easily search for specific services or navigate the Field Service Catalog by category. Operations and IT Service Delivery spent the past two years designing this portal to have a consistent look and feel with the IT Request portal, ensuring similar community experiences engaging with Operations and IT. Enhanced Campus Activities with Service Management Examining the scope of work across campus for fiscal year 2022 (FY22), Operations received 49,997 work orders from the community, which produced 35,526 associated tasks in ServiceNow. The top five groups in terms of Service Management tasks assigned are Service Counter and Housing; Operational Support Services; Moves; Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC); and Custodial Services. One example of how the new platform improves efficiency comes from Marco Cabral, maintenance technician on the Facilities team. During FY22, Marco completed 1,662 tasks responding to electrical maintenance requests across campus, averaging between 400–500 tasks per quarter. Marco is always on the go, so new work shows up on his mobile device where he can interact with the service request and his dispatcher quickly and in real time—often within an hour of ticket creation.
 Examining the scope of work across campus for fiscal year 2022 (FY22), Operations received 49,997 work orders from the community, which produced 35,526 associated tasks in ServiceNow. The top five groups in terms of Service Management tasks assigned are Service Counter and Housing; Operational Support Services; Moves; Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC); and Custodial Services. One example of how the new platform improves efficiency comes from Marco Cabral, maintenance technician on the Facilities team. During FY22, Marco completed 1,662 tasks responding to electrical maintenance requests across campus, averaging between 400–500 tasks per quarter. Marco is always on the go, so new work shows up on his mobile device where he can interact with the service request and his dispatcher quickly and in real time—often within an hour of ticket creation.  Spotlight on how Marco Cabral has leveraged Service Management for electrical maintenance
Another example comes from Executive Education Guest Services, who have a dashboard view into Operations work requests. When a participant comes to ExEd Guest Services, they can use that dashboard to see where their work order is in process, which helps provide the seamless guest support that participants have come to expect while on campus. Digital Transformation & the Future of Service Management What does the future hold for Service Management? As Digital Transformation has become a major focus for the School, Operations and IT Service Delivery are continuing to innovate and experiment with the platform to take on larger, more complex bodies of work. One recently released enhancement is a planned maintenance module for HBS residence halls that allows Operations to streamline workflows across multiple trades (painting, HVAC, custodial, electrical, etc.) for an entire building, with up to 11 related tasks managed by the Housing team. Operations and IT are also taking a more proactive approach to campus needs to reduce the number of reactive work orders. By examining the vast amount of data collected by Service Management, Operations and IT have gained new insights on how to improve their own performance. IT’s Data Engineering Services team is collaborating with Operations to improve their digital competencies around data management and report analysis to better understand the HBS community, their requests, where work is happening on campus, and how that data can benefit others around the School. “The power of ServiceNow is in its workflows and data,” concluded Ian Gaisford, senior director of Finance and Operations. “We imagine the platform will continue to evolve over time to where we can draw detailed insights from the system to identify trouble spots before they manifest into a reactive service call, help better identify trends to inform how we improve our built space, and facilitate a greater level of understanding of how our operational resources can support the mission of the School.”  |
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