evosoft GmbH is an international IT company (with nearshore partners in Hungary, Romania and Turkey) which has been developing tailormade software, solutions and IT Services since 1995 and support customers throughout the complete IT value chain – from consulting and design to commissioning, training and operator management. The concerned project team of evosoft’s ALM department consists of 30 people and is providing Software-as-a-service for more than 25.000 users, who all work in software development. Two engineers are managing the iTop CMDB and Change Management implementation. They deal with about 100 servers and 1.000 software instances worldwide, which need to be deployed, monitored and maintained efficiently. Let’s deep dive into this project including iTop supported by iTomig with Adrian Neumann, Change manager at evosoft GmbH.
The team was originally using Excel sheets to manage all assets related to those projects, which increased the risk of error, and was time consuming for administrators & change manager. They first started with a proof of concept (POC) based on iTop Community to check the acceptance of administrators. As this first step was successful, they moved to a subscription edition with support of ITOMIG GmbH, iTop OEM partner in Germany. Then evosoft and ITOMIG decided to use an incremental methodology to make sure they would get a maximum of users acceptance and avoid expensive issues during each implementation phase. After implementing the CMDB (Configuration Management Database) with iTop, the solution has been adapted to evosoft’s specific needs, with customizations such as the user interface, or a consolidated table view to see all the CMDB information in a raw.
The next step was to introduce automation through the integration with a release management software, to automatically update the CMDB at each release rollout. First of all, this integration saved a lot of work to both teams, as the software assets updates were automated, and it improved the collaboration between administrators and developers. Indeed, iTop has been accepted by both teams as the reference platform and they all work together to ensure the best quality and experience real DevOps collaboration and processes. This cut down the deployment efforts per release by factor 16.
Starting with iTop Community was a good way to test the acceptance. Nevertheless, with no full time resource it was too complicated and long. Indeed, customizations take hours in xml. As an iTop expert, ITOMIG was the ideal partner to help evosoft get faster. That’s why Adrian has decided to switch to a Professional edition with a consulting contract. evosoft and ITOMIG work on short release cycles to continuously add improvements and added value to iTop. And the benefits are quickly visible. For example, it took ITOMIG about two hours to add 2 classes to document Service Processes, related Process Roles & assignments to Contacts in the Design & presentation and it works well. In Adrian’s opinion, if you introduce ITSM tools, it is more efficient and pragmatic to do it in small steps rather than in big steps. “If you have small enhancements, you will maximize the acceptance.”
As next step, change management has been selected as the first process to be put in place in iTop, especially within an international setup, evosoft wanted to fit its existing process the closest possible to the existing and accepted change process. That’s why evosoft decided to not use the out-of the box change management features from iTop and rather customize them using ITSM Designer, introducing notifications, different roles with associated tasks. The application has been adapted to the specific wording & views of the company and teams, which drove a good acceptance, as users were not lost and could find the information very quickly without huge training efforts. Of course security has been taken into account in the overall application, with specific authorization depending on users roles, the integration of 2-factor authentication based on SAML connected to an ID Access Management system. “Now that the CMDB is working and we have successfully implemented the change management process, why shoud we stop?” In the future they want to connect all systems and display them in iTop (inventory, etc) to build a Centralized IT services management system. And they will of course ask for ITOMIG’s help. “We still have regular meetings with ITOMIG to continue improving the tool. Without ITOMIG we would not be at this position now. Working with the team is great, and we really like iTop.”
