Operations & Service Delivery for MSPs

Managing complex projects, with multiple stakeholders, tight deadlines and fixed costs, can be both time consuming and fraught with issues. Questions such as “where are we with…?” and “when will x be complete…?” are often difficult to establish when being up-to-date on the status of your project is paramount to delivering on-time and in-budget. You need both visibility and control in order to make better informed project decisions. Sunrise ITSM supports your desire for improved project management by providing centralised management of all aspects of your project including capturing the business case, anticipated costs vs actual costs, effort expected and delivered, deadlines and delivery milestones, as well as stakeholders and allocated resources. Project requirements can be tracked, with individual actions broken down into specific tasks that can be assigned and tracked accordingly. Any project specific issues can also be managed until resolution.

Improved project visibility and control With Sunrise ITSM, your Project records become centralised repositories for all those involved in delivery, from business stakeholders, engineers, and even your customers. Status updates can be given to all, project risks tracked and mitigated, and complementary documentation attached and shared with other project resources.

Integrated fully with Sunrise ITSM Audit capabilities, your projects can be regularly audited and monitored, providing comprehensive information covering all aspects of your project’s compliance with internal policies, or external legal frameworks. Whether your projects are big or small, Sunrise IT Service Management allows you to see at-a-glance the current status of all of your projects, manage tasks and issues to tight deadlines, deliver against your milestones, and get back under control. With Sunrise ITSM Project Management you’ll always have the right project information on hand exactly when you need it.

Whether you’re a manufacturer or supplier, all too often the products you provide malfunction; despite all efforts, they must be shipped back to site for investigation, and possibly a repair or replacement under warranty. Keeping everyone in the loop, and tracking the current status of a return at every step of the way, is critical to making the whole process seamless and transparent.

With Sunrise Service Management you can track all supported items at each stage of the returns process from initial reporting of a fault, through to transit, testing, final repair, and resolution. This increased visibility over the whole returns process keeps customers in the loop and allows you to gain control over all return requests.

In cases where multiple items require returning each item can be allocated to the same return record ensuring that you have a consolidated view of return activities including the total value of all returned items, and the customer contract they belong to.

As the return progresses individual tasks can be assigned to engineers to fully test the item, undertake and necessary refurbishment. Sunrise Service Management ensures full traceability and visibility of progress very step of the way.

When something goes wrong it’s important to have an accurate Configuration Management Database (CMDB) containing a record of each Configuration Item (CI). But keeping the information up-to-date on hundreds, or even thousands, of desktops, laptops, servers, printers, and services can be almost impossible without a centralised database of configuration items. Without accurate information to hand, your Service Desk cannot accurately understand the impact of changes, the likely effect of loss of services on your IT users, nor pro-actively manage customer expectations. Sunrise IT Service Management allows you to track detailed information on every CI, including technical information, financial facts and figures, and the suppliers you need to contact in an emergency. All assets can be linked to their originating orders, warranty and underpinning contracts, as well as their current owners.

With a consolidated CMDB you can keep track of your assets by linking configuration items to people, departments, locations and other services. Tracking the Incidents and Problems that relate to each CI is simple, and assessing the impact of any Change becomes a breeze.

With Sunrise IT Service Management you can manage a central store for all Configuration Items be they hardware, software, IT services or anything in between.

Change is inevitable but managing it can be tricky. IT is complex, multiple stakeholders are often involved, and processes can be difficult to follow. If change is not closely managed then time slips, actions are missed, and changes pass into production without anyone noticing anything is wrong until it’s too late. This can lead to service degradation or even complete system outages. Ultimately everyone is impacted. No wonder then that effective Change and Release Management is so important. Sunrise IT Service Management Change Management allows you to see who is impacted by potential changes to key services, allows you to manage multiple stakeholders and deadlines, and automatically keeps everyone updated as the change progresses from approvals, to implementation, testing and production release.

Sunrise IT Service Management contains comprehensive Release and Change Management features allowing you to keep on top of all of your Changes, from the smallest to the largest. Reduce the time you take to roll out any release, and improve the overall quality and effectiveness, with Sunrise IT Service Management.

Sunrise IT Service Management allows you to associate key changes to existing Problems or Known Errors, then allocate multiple changes to release packages for final testing and deployment. Understand the impact of Change using the consolidated CMDB, manage Change blackout periods, and minimise the risk of failed change by increasing visibility across your teams. With Sunrise IT Service Management you’ll never miss a release target for your Changes again.

Accurate information, resource planning and management are all essential components of your release management strategy. Without a consolidated release management process you’re prone to complexities, issues and potential pitfalls that create havoc, confusion, and lost revenue. Not to mention the unhappy customers. Sunrise IT Service Management gives you a holistic overview of how each release impacts all other areas of your service desk. Sunrise IT Service Management’s Release processes ensures each Change Request related to each release package is centrally stored, always available, and up-to-date. Key milestones relating to each release can be flagged, with automatic alerts being sent to interested parties when key dates are reached. Training and documentation updates can be scheduled around key release dates, again with email notification where appropriate. In addition, records of test cycles can be maintained and analysed for future reference, as well as adding any known issues as problems and associating these with the release package and individual Change Request that introduced them.

Through careful and controlled Release Management processes, significant reductions in costs can be seen, through improved utilisation of your valuable IT resources. This ensures a greater quality of each Release, as well as an overall reduction of the length of time it will take you to roll out.

Sunrise IT Service Management’s Release processes will put you in control of every step of your route to live deployment for your packages of Change.

As automated server and application monitoring tools make increasing levels of information available to system administrators, it is important to be able to filter events that require action from events that do not. Some events might require no action at all; others might require an Incident or even a Change to be initiated. But sometimes it can be hard to see this through the “noise” of so many alerts. Sunrise IT Service Management Event Management enables you to define the rules that will be triggered by significant events found by your automated monitoring tools. You can specify the type of threshold which will trigger the event and even initiate a Change or an Incident as appropriate. Incoming events are automatically associated to the event record, which in turn automatically links the record to any Configuration Item (CI) involved in the event.

With events linked to Configuration Items (CIs), Incidents and Changes it’s easy to perform analysis of the information and spot trends, such as event breaches by Item type.

Event Management can gather information from manual input, from the database directly, via email, or using the Sostenuto REST web service API.

As Service Desk and other IT staff go about their business supporting staff, maintaining equipment, and implementing IT strategies, it’s inevitable that actions take time and costs are incurred. This detail needs to be tracked and accounted for to establish true cost visibility over time. Knowledge of your greatest time and cost sinks is critical to understanding the true value of IT to the business, and gaining a handle on potential operational efficiencies.

Sunrise ITSM provides detailed tracking of all time and expenses incurred during all aspects of IT operation from those undertaking support activities. Whether investigating and resolving Problems, implementing Changes, rolling out Releases, performing Audits, or running complex Projects, you’ll have full visibility of the time taken and costs incurred.

Sunrise ITSM tracks expenses across your IT service management disciplines, providing invaluable insight into your most expensive activities. Using integrated reporting you can analyse both time spent and expenses to establish clear cost goals, transparency, and reduce the likelihood of stumbling across hidden support costs and unexpected time sinks.