Radian Group has completed the implementation of new IT service management software from Sunrise Software.
Radian Group was formed in 2012 following the merger of three housing providers. Ian Butcher, IT operations manager, Radian Group said, “Our service management system was fine when it was bought for one of the housing providers. It was a small organisation of just a couple of hundred employees with an IT team of just four people. However, after the merger and the overnight expansion to 1,500 people and an IT team of more than 30 people, it could no longer keep up.”
Explaining Radian’s decision to implement Sunrise’s IT Service Management (ITSM) solution, Butcher said, “A key factor was the ability to not only have a solution that could grow with us but which could also move beyond a basic ticketing system.
“We wanted a solution that was aligned with the ITIL requirements, while offering us greater reporting capabilities. We wanted to have the ability to manage groups of people, assign calls to specific user groups, prioritise tasks and put calls on hold. Until the Sunrise deployment we couldn’t those things which meant that meeting our SLAs was difficult.”
The deployment of Sunrise ITSM has allowed Radian to create a customised solution that will adapt to its business and meet the needs of a busy service desk.
Butcher said, “The level of customisation afforded to us from Sunrise ITSM was impressive and it acts more as an engine that we can more or less build anything into and easily adjust.
“With Sunrise, we can quickly develop and adapt the system to deliver what we need right there, right then. From this standpoint alone, we have improved efficiencies across the service desk and among the team, resulting in more time being spent actually resolving support queries.”
The Sunrise ITSM solution is used by Radian’s front-line service desk team to manage, action and prioritise calls, by the IS team for third-line support for escalated queries, and by the in-house development team to monitor for any bugs and track the status of systems developed in-house.
Butcher said, “Before the introduction of Sunrise ITSM, we couldn’t keep track and report on the activities and successes of the service desk. We wanted the ability to keep track of how we are performing against our SLAs because, before Sunrise ITSM, service calls could quite quickly fall foul of SLAs, although there was nothing we could do about it because we couldn’t place queries on hold. Now we have a much more accurate view and can take proactive measures before an issue becomes a problem.”
