HealthPartners adopts ServiceNow to transform its IT organization

Replacing a customized solution with an out-of-the-box app

HealthPartners enhances the IT service experience with ServiceNow and cuts call volumes by 50%
HealthPartners, a non-profit healthcare system that serves more than 1.5 million health plan members, is a long-standing ServiceNow^®  IT Service Management customer. The organization originally brought in ServiceNow to replace its legacy IT helpdesk and then rapidly expanded the solution to all of its service management needs, including incident, change, and configuration management. It also launched a ServiceNow service destination where employees enter and track service requests, reducing status inquiry calls by more than 50%.

HealthPartners extends ServiceNow to project portfolio management, retiring legacy tools and reducing costs
By choosing ServiceNow, HealthPartners transformed its entire IT organization, not just IT service management. Then it was an early adopter of ServiceNow^® Project Portfolio Management (PPM). According to Skip Newton, HealthPartners’ Manager of Service Management Platforms, “ServiceNow isn’t a point product—it’s an end-to-end platform. We wanted to leverage that platform beyond ITSM, and Project Portfolio Management was a perfect place to start. We saved money by retiring our existing project management and time-tracking tool. And ServiceNow PPM was easier to use.”

To access all of ServiceNow’s powerful features, HealthPartners migrates from custom to out-of-the-box
Early on, HealthPartners customized the PPM solution to create new capabilities and support specific processes. Skip says, “ServiceNow is incredibly flexible, which is why it’s easy to build new applications. For example, we’ve built custom apps for our call center. However, customizing out-of-the-box ServiceNow applications has a downside. It makes them difficult to upgrade. In our case, we were on an old release of PPM, and couldn’t access the latest and greatest PPM features—such as demand management and resource management.”

Rather than continuing with its customized PPM solution, HealthPartners decided to use the latest out-of-the-box application. “As we looked at PPM, we realized how far it has advanced. We could achieve virtually everything we wanted through configuration, and that meant we could leverage the most recent capabilities and future roadmap. The migration went really well. In fact, it was almost painless,” says Skip.

Now, HealthPartners can leverage the full power of ServiceNow PPM–and beyond. For example, Skip says, “From a pure PPM perspective, we can now manage Agile and Waterfall projects in one place, including the dependencies between them. And, we’ve modernized the way we plan and manage projects. Rather than laboriously laying out tasks and subtasks. We can do everything with a few clicks right from the project workbench, including spinning up standardized projects from templates.”

HealthPartners manages its entire demand pipeline in ServiceNow, eliminating manual processes
ServiceNow^® Resource Management has also delivered major benefits. “It’s not just about projects. With ServiceNow, we can now manage all of our work in one place. That lets us balance resources across projects, incidents, changes, service requests, and many other activities. You just can’t do that with a standalone project management tool. And, with ServiceNow^® Demand Management, we can now manage our entire demand pipeline and easily deflect unnecessary demand. Before, it was spread across hundreds of documents and spreadsheets–screening, qualifying, and approving demands was an enormous effort,” says Skip.

IT services are now tightly, transparently aligned with business priorities
Skip also stresses the importance of visibility, particularly alignment with business priorities. “We’re much more transparent. Our customers can see exactly what we’re doing, what we’re working on, how we’ve allocated our resources, and how much effort each activity takes. That makes it much easier to have meaningful, productive discussions with our business stakeholders."

HealthPartners is extending ServiceNow to IT financial management
Looking forward, HealthPartners plans to expand their IT business management capabilities. ServiceNow^® Financial Management is next on their agenda. In fact, the healthcare provider recently went live with a pilot implementation. Skip is enthusiastic, saying that, “Financial management will let us look at our overall spend from a portfolio perspective, particularly when we link it back to PPM. That means we can make better investment decisions and measure how we’re performing against our objectives.”