NHS Shared Business Services

We spoke to Victoria Wood, Head of IT Service Delivery at NHS Shared Business Services, about how they implemented TOPdesk, and what benefits they have seen.

Why did you choose topdesk?

It met our core needs when we were looking at requirements for replacing our product. We felt it was the most suitable on the market as it offered the additional opportunities we were looking to explore such as a self service portal to enable consumers to access our IT service desk to leverage self service capabilities. We were also lacking capability to deliver core ITIL service management processes such as asset management, supplier management, and incident management, so TOPdesk enabled us to meet those requirements. It also integrated well with our other tooling and offered a full suite of processes that complemented ITIL. Lastly, it was also value for money.

How did you find the implementation and working alongside a consultant?

We had a great relationship with our TOPdesk consultant, it felt like someone who was part of our team so it was really collaborative. They were clearly an expert in the field, they knew their subject matter exceptionally well and took time to learn our business, understand our processes and therefore help shape the TOPdesk product to complement our business needs.

We had challenges such as a short time scale to implement, and we had to make decisions around priorities. The TOPdesk consultant was realistic about what could be achieved in the timescale and helped us to focus on these priorities. Implementation took around 4-6 months in total, including waiting time on our side for things to be done.

What benefits have you seen?

We’ve got fully integrated change management and incident management processes which we didn’t have before – we used to have an incident management tool to manage all changes and incidents. We now use TOPdesk to manage service requests and incidents, and can take advantage of the knowledge management capability both through agents accessing knowledge to solve incoming queries, any by users not needing to submit an incident once they’ve seen the knowledge articles. This is obviously a much more trending culture that people are moving towards – they want the omni channel support that TOPdesk can offer. Before we were limited to emailing or calling for help and it’s now been expanded to include the SSP and the knowledge base for self service so have broadened the opportunity for contact and empowered users to find their own answers.

How has TOPdesk grown within the organisation?

We have a lot more operator licenses which is an obvious sign of growth. We started with our main support teams using TOPdesk to resolve incidents, manage the change process, and use problem management processes, but over the past few years we have a lot more teams in the business using TOPdesk. We now have information governance in Shared Business Services onboarded, who are responsible for protecting our data within NHS SBS to ensure it is safely stored and safely accessed with no loss of data or access given to the wrong people. Being able to have the right access to the right data by the right people at the right time is extremely important. We’ve really broadened our usage of TOPdesk and we’re still going now with more initiatives, and with more demand for more people to be able to use it.

What are the next steps for TOPdesk at SBS?

We’re keen to support the NHS in how they can use data to deliver efficiencies and cost savings to optimise the NHS. Data is such an opportunity in the NHS at the moment so this is the priority. We also want to create the opportunity for the data team to receive incidents and change requests to develop new reporting capabilities, for example a new sustainability report for the NHS to understand their net zero impact.

Developing a CMDB and delivering Chatbot capability are two things that are really important to us to help us offer improved services to the NHS.

Any advice to other organisations in your sector if they were to implement TOPdesk?

Ensure you spend enough time upfront designing your portal to attract your consumers to be able to self-serve and self-help. Any organisation who is wanting to become more productive and want their employees to access portals, knowledge, and solutions for themselves should invest in developing that portal to make it easy to consume the services – it’s crucial to being successful.