Statistics New Zealand

Statistics New Zealand’s goal is to provide New Zealand with the statistical information it needs to grow and prosper. With three offices across New Zealand, they have over 100 IT staff supporting approximately 1,000 end users. After a major restructure the Enterprise Solutions team was developed and tasked with delivering on a number of service delivery priorities – to increase value to the business, provide self-help and self-healing, improve existing services, improve first time resolution rates, and to reduce costs through automation of requests.

A rapid deployment approach

With an ambitious four-week timeframe to go live, the deployment took a combined approach of ‘Just-in-Time’ and ‘Just-Enough’ – a variation of the 80/20 approach. Darryl Hobbs, Manager Service Delivery explains “We accepted that we would use a lean-agile development approach to the platform, with the possibility of rework. Our philosophy was that if we got 80% right it would be enough to keep us going while we sorted out the remaining 20%.”
Using this approach Darryl and his team were able to deploy their service management platform in only four weeks, deploying incident and service request management, a basic service catalogue, service level agreements and a knowledge base. In addition, a customer portal and automation within incidents, tasks, requests and approvals were also available from day one.

Delivering on the promise

Statistics New Zealand were able to deliver on their promises, including meeting the service priorities for self-help, resolution at first point of contact, and improving service. “Meeting our tight timeframe was only possible with the combination of our rapid deployment approach, capability of the Cherwell platform and the mentoring from Service Dynamics,” said Darryl.

The results

• Cherwell rapid deployment resulting in go-live in four weeks.
• There Cherwell codeless platform combined with Service Dynamics mentoring, provided internal IT staff with the knowledge to configure Cherwell, eliminating the need for external consultancy.
• Call Volume was able to increase by 15% with no increase in head count.
• Resolution at First Point of Contact is now able to be measured, achieving an impressive 60%.
• Both Response and Resolve times are now able to be measured, with the Mean Time to Resolve decreasing by 44%, significantly reducing the impact of incidents to the business.
• Over half of all calls are now logged via the Customer Portal, resulting in a clear picture of workload, with a 65/35 split of requests to incidents.