ENGIE Mexico transforms its ITSM to generate more value for their customers while saving time and money

A transparent migration for users

The first challenge of the project was to rebuild the same structure used in the other ITSM tool in Jira Service Management.

The idea was to avoid overlapping the tools, general IT demands, change management, and incident management capabilities needed to work seamlessly from day one.

ENGIE connected with Atlassian Solution Partner EnevaSys to remap the 12 current services available and reproduce them in Jira Service Management. During the 3 month process, Engie and the Solution Partner mapped and configured Jira Service Management while also training Engie’s 1,700 users.

According to Lizárraga, there were no complications in the migration and everything that had to be adjusted was quickly solved. “The change was transparent and smooth”, he explains.

“It was like lowering the curtain down and raising the curtain up again. We simply turned off ServiceNow one night and turned Jira on the very next day. It was transparent to our users”, adds Lizárraga.

Automation that saves valuable time

One of the strengths of the Atlassian-way to ITSM is the integration not only with Atlassian's products but also with other platforms.

In the case of ENGIE, connecting the Microsoft Power BI database to Jira was essential to automate the reports and free up time that was previously dedicated to getting the right info, filling out spreadsheets, and organizing many reports.

“We used to spend hundreds of hours generating reports, and now this activity is 100% automated in Jira”, he says.

The team estimates that just by automating workflows, reporting, and SLA management in Jira, it was possible to save over 200 hours per month of the technical team’s time.

For ENGIE, migrating data from spreadsheets to Jira connected with Power BI had another advantage: the access to information became more transparent and encouraged people to work in a more organized way.

User-friendly platform and strong community helping to accelerate the ITSM evolution

The ease of evolving the platform autonomously was another feature that positively surprised the ENGIE team.

Lizárraga shares that, when using the previous tool, they would have to call the service for everything, since there was not much documentation, nor many templates, or usage examples available.

On the other hand, after the migration, the team was able to take advantage of shared templates and best practices to make improvements in an agile and independent way with Jira, in addition to finding practical tips in the various user communities, videos, or content published by the providers and Atlassian itself.

Soon after the migration, ENGIE was able to launch new services, such as problem management, and enhance important services by leveraging catalog best practices, subtask flows, prioritization and ticket routing capabilities. 

"Jira helped us to improve the user experience while increasing productivity by allowing for better classification of services and automatically routing the requests to the people who can actually solve them.”

Jose Luis Lizárraga Castro, IT Support Engineer at ENGIE Mexico

Jira Service Management in HR: automation and efficiency

Within the initial first weeks, the team began to see an ROI: key processes migrated, change management and incident management, new services created, and problem management.

ENGIE then felt confident enough to expand its scope and adopt the platform in other areas of the company for a true ESM approach

To facilitate the work of the Human Resources team, the workflows related to  new employee onboarding and deprovisioning  incorporated and automated, with specific SLAs for each activity.

Human Resources teams no longer need to manually run requests for systems access and employees' assets, nor control email flows and deadlines for the different onboarding or offboarding activities.

As soon as an employee is hired at ENGIE or leaves the company, all the areas involved in the processes receive automatic requests that can be easily approved.

"Now, managers receive a request from Jira and approve it from their mobile phone, without even having to connect to a computer", comments Lizárraga.

The entire flow is now visible, activities are prioritized, and the SLA of each activity is managed automatically, greatly increasing HR's productivity and improving the employee experience.

Accelerating self-service with confluence

Another product adopted by ENGIE to expand its user-centric view was Confluence, Atlassian's complete solution for managing project, service, and process documentation.

The platform, which fully integrates with Jira, now centralizes the entire company's knowledge base. And, as it is cloud-based, it can be accessed anytime, anywhere, and by any user.

“It a part of ENGIE's culture to improve self-service. Confluence allowed us to make manuals and processes available to all in a very fluid way. Now, many customers can usually find the solution to their problem even before opening a ticket”, adds Lizárraga.

The initiative prevented engineers and technical teams from spending time on solving questions that customers could resolve autonomously and efficiently.

Since the solution was well-received by all, it also started to be adopted by different project areas, which are taking advantage of the various templates available in Confluence to create their own knowledge bases and accelerate self-service.

Jira Service Management boosting continuous improvement

For ENGIE Mexico, this is just the beginning.

Lizárraga comments that his plan is to leverage the autonomy provided by Jira Service Management to continuously improve Engie’s service offering.

A more recent initiative has to do with taking advantage of Insight — Asset Management already included in the Premium version of Jira Service Management, to go beyond the CMDB and redesign the entire company's asset management.

“We are integrating everything, from the most basic assets to computers, servers, and mobiles to automate the entire asset management”, explains Lizárraga.

The project is in the final implementation stage, and the team is already planning to expand the use of Jira to the IT sourcing and quality area.

Using Atlassian solutions as a boost to accelerate agile and collaborative work ENGIE Mexico expands, consolidates, and improves its vision of customer centricity throughout the organization, one initiative at a time.

Atlassian is rapidly becoming the main hub of connection between teams, where everyone can find information and collaborate to deliver more value to our customers," concludes Lizárraga.