Best Practices for Forming a Successful Partnership with a Service Management Vendor

Welcome back to the series – 10 Must Ask Questions When Buying (or re-signing) a Service Management Solution. If you missed previous posts, catch up with the links below.

Question #10: How do you partner with us to ensure our success?

Talk is easy.  Delivering actual results is much tougher.  Evaluating whether a Service Management solution will deliver ultimately comes down to determining if the vendor has what it takes to successfully partner with your organization and transform your goals into reality.

Partnering for success: Two key factors

How do you know if you’re partnering with the right vendor? There are two things that are essential for a lucrative service management partnership:

1. A full understanding of the end goal from the very beginning. This ensures you are always working towards that end goal, achieving measurable and quality results.

2. An understanding that products, tools, and solutions support the end goal; they aren’t the end goal itself.

Your success in the modern era goes well beyond the traditional ITSM solution and the vendor behind it. It’s dependent on a solution provider with a vision, and conviction, along with a product built to enable the enterprise mobile imperative, and a Trust program to ensure a thriving partnership at every level.  Your service management solution provider must be able to demonstrate that it understands your end goal and how its tool will support your current and future objectives.

Once you address these critical items, it should become clear if this vendor can help you work towards the goals that are specific to your organization.  At that point, you can spend your time working through use cases and advanced integrations—not just within the service management solution itself, but also through integrations with third party tools and service providers.

Know your vendor history

A great way to know if a vendor can support your goals—now and in the future— is to be aware of the history behind the service management solution in question.  Was it built from the start with service management best practices embedded into the products and staff DNA? Or was it cobbled together over time through mergers or acquisitions of various tools and functionalities that don’t have core best practices or seamless integrations?  While product configuration may be great for the vendor’s bottom line, these platforms can be complicated, not being natively designed for the task at hand. Piecemeal platforms can be an indication that comprehensive service management is not a primary focus, nor a core strength.

Once purchased, you may need to add increased functionality with a key process such as Configuration Management or Service Catalog; in other cases, it may be the ability to deploy the solution “from the cloud.” With these integrated additions, functionality is boosted for the core solution; yet far too often, it is left stranded or isolated if the previous core functionality is not kept up-to-date or revised.

Purchasing for functionality today, without a full understanding of the history of the solution, could leave you unsupported when you most need support.  Knowing your goals, along with the capabilities and limitations of the chosen vendor, ensures you make the best choice available.

Proven service management track record

EasyVista has more than 20 years of experience in service management, with its early roots in asset management. The result is a strong, highly integrated product built from the ground up in best practices and mobile-first enablement. With more than 1,000 customers spanning the globe, over 6 million users, and a 98% retention rate, EasyVista is a partner to be trusted.

“Mobile-first has become a key buying criteria for companies in every industry. It’s played a key role in nearly every organization we’ve worked with over the last year. Never before has IT been more affected by end users’ service expectations. The X-factor in service management today is how companies deliver elegant services to the array of mobile devices their users rely on every day.” - Kevin Coppins, EasyVista General Manager, North America

Learn More

Catch up on this full series: 10 Must Ask Questions When Buying (or re-signing) a Service Management Solution

Post 1 – Overview
Post 2 – Closing the Gap Between User Expectations and IT Service Realities
Post 3 – The Emerging Mobility Challenge: Supporting User Productivity in a BYOD World
Post 4 – Services Must be Easy to Deliver to Achieve Service Management Success
Post 5 – Delivering Rapid Business Value with Easy Codeless Service Design
Post 6 – Driving Business Innovation with Service Management
Post 7 – Why Mobile-first Matters in a Service Management Solution
Post 8 – Select Seamless Integration Capabilities for First-rate Service Delivery
Post 9 – How to Calculate Total Cost of Service Delivery of an ITSM Solution
Post 10 – 5 Things That Prove a Service Management Vendor is Invested in Your Success 
Post 11 – Best Practices for Forming a Successful Partnership with a Service Management Vendor