How Clarks are improving Demand Management within Global IT

Challenges

One of the common challenges for IT departments within large enterprises such as Clarks is managing the large number of employees across offices worldwide, working on multiple projects, each using different task and reporting processes. This makes it difficult for senior management to attain a consolidated view.

IT departments need to juggle major projects alongside vast amounts of small changes, all of which have a spectrum of urgency and priority, along with the day-to-day business as usual support requirements.

The Clarks IT Leadership team wanted to improve the capability of accurately reporting the workload on IT, to ensure that demand for IT services is managed in a way that is aligned with business priorities. The Clarks IT team was therefore tasked with finding a single solution for both task reporting and demand management.

Decision Making Process

The Clarks team was looking for a solution which would solve multiple issues, yet still fit within its existing IT budget. Therefore, they wanted to either expand their existing system or upgrade a tool already being used by the teams.

Part of the IT business had been using Atlassian Jira Software and Zephyr for approximately three years to manage the delivery of software projects and it was known to be robust and easy to use.

With BDQ’s guidance, the Clarks IT Leadership team understood that with Jira Software, they already had a solution which could provide multiple, customised reports and boards that were relevant for each of the 26 internal teams, all driven from a single source of service demand information.

However, many service requests and demands were funnelled into Clarks’ global helpdesk system and it became apparent that Jira Software and Assyst would need to be integrated in order to gain a single source of information.

Clarks approached a selection of companies for advice on how to execute a project of this type, but quickly became aware that it was not a common requirement, and would therefore require extensive research.

BDQ explained Jira's open integration architecture and integration possibilities, and then drafted a solution proposal that would fit Clark’s requirements.

The Benefits Received from Atlassian's Products

With the Atlassian suite Clarks’ entire IT Department now has visibility of the incoming workflow as a whole, and the priority issues that they should be working on first. Resources can now be allocated much more effectively, urgent items are dealt with faster, and that ultimately improves relationships with the business areas that have submitted the requests.

“Clarks is now able to funnel all requests for the IT team, whether regarding enhancements, service requests or incident reports, into a single JIRA repository, enabling teams to manage demand,” says Jim Killmister, Head of IT Planning, “Not only that, but we see JIRA as a key solution enabling us to collate issues in a single place that we can report into the senior leadership team more effectively.”

Alison Russell, Lead of IT Continuous Improvement and Training, adds, “We are able to use the same toolset, with the same visibility of the priority tasks that we want our teams to engage with first. This can be done for all 26 of our teams across various countries, which for us, is excellent.