IT Service Management – ITSM & HelpDesk Software – Request for Proposal – RFP Sample Template
| Sl. No | General System Functionality | Availability (Yes / No) | |
| The tool must support ITIL and must be pink verified for minimum 11 Processes / Practices, of which Incident, Service Request, Change, Problem, Knowledge Management, System Asset & Configuration Management are mandatory | |||
| Tool must Provide ISO 20000 & 27001 Standard implementation support. | |||
| Tool must have IT Governance Support with ability to manage Risks | |||
| Tool should have additional capability to support future IT Governance initiatives for Risk, Audit & Polices Management. This is a future requirement. | |||
| Tool must be having employee self-service portal | |||
| Tool must be Capable of handling non-IT service requests from HR / Facilities | |||
| Has excellent out-of-the-box business processes, forms and views in order to jump-start deployments | |||
| Could Provide all major languages (English / Arabic/ French) & Local Calendar’s | |||
| Could Provide a secure historical audit log of all actions | |||
| News and System Outage broadcasts Could be made | |||
| Tool must have customization capabilities, like adding Fields to Screen at Run-time – Field Could vary depending on type of Service offered. This should be possible without any programming | |||
| Tool must have executive dashboard with drill down capability, In all modules | |||
| Real-time color coded management dashboards, must be available. | |||
| Tool must have ability to send custom surveys Could be automatically sent to users after issues are resolved | |||
| Tool must be Scalable Solution and Could Provide multi-tenancy | |||
| Tool must have ability to archive closed records to improve system performance | |||
| Must have native mobile apps on Android and IOS Devices | |||
| Mobile apps must also support single sign on active directory integration | |||
| Integration Options | |||
| Tool must have integration Capability to synchronize with MS Active Directory / LDAP for user login and single sign on | |||
| System must have ability to integrate with Microsoft’s Operations Manager & other event monitoring tools | |||
| Must have capability for auto ticket creation from outside Applications / Interfaces and classify it as Event/Incident/Problem/Change. | |||
| Must Integrate with Email and SMS gateways for sending alerts and notifications to administrators and end-users | |||
| Self – Service Features | |||
| End Users (Employees / Customers) must be able to do the following: | |||
| Create tickets based on visual service catalog | |||
| Able to create requests for Incidents, Service Requests and Change Requests | |||
| Check the status of Incidents or requests tickets in a dashboard | |||
| Could Provide monitoring of active requests and incidents, using dashboards | |||
| Add notes or comments to a request at any time until it is closed. | |||
| Could create new Tasks/Work orders from within an incidents/service requests | |||
| Could create new Tasks/Work orders from within an incidents/service requests | |||
| Attach documents to an Incident or service request | |||
| Search a knowledge base solutions & has Search capability by multiple criteria | |||
| View News, FAQ’s and System Outages Information | |||
| Respond to published Surveys as part of Continual Service Improvement | |||
| Incident Management | |||
| Ability to change Incident form based on Service Item, without any programming for populating specific field for data capture. | |||
| Dynamic fields on the Incident form, should have conditional expressions, which populate custom Drop Down Lists or Radio buttons, based on dynamic values of data. | |||
| Tools must have controls to open, modify, on hold, close and re-open incidents based on pre-established conditions using console or self-service Portal for both internal employees and external customers. | |||
| Support matching of incident records, related problem records/ known error records and relevant knowledge articles to assist service desk staff and/or for self-help | |||
| Tool must have ability to automatically trigger actions as per the underlying workflow when SLAs are in danger of being breached | |||
| Has Incident models to easily handle recurring incidents, with Steps to be taken, Sequence of Actions, Timescales & Thresholds and automatic escalation | |||
| Must have multi-level – hierarchical category fields to record the type of incident at opening, during the call, and at closing the categories Could be set by service desk | |||
| Must have field or field(s) to assign an initial incident priority according to pre-established and manually overridden conditions (SLA, businessServices impacted, level of service disruption etc.) | |||
| Could have ability to input free rich text & attach multiple files for the recording of Incident descriptions and resolutions | |||
| Allow automated routing (alerting) of Incidents to selected support staff or groups | |||
| Escalations Could be set based on service / operational level targets, business priority to set notifications for support tiers, managers and vendors | |||
| Must support cloning of Incidents | |||
| Must have ability to Close multiple incidents of same nature with a parent child relationship | |||
| Should be able to record service cost and amount of time worked | |||
| Should support incident trend analysis | |||
| Could have ability to perform closure of Incidents by utilizing customizable Incident closure codes | |||
| Must have simple and advanced search capabilities in all languages | |||
| Tool facilitates the closure of all Incidents when the associated Problem, Known Error and Change record is closed | |||
| Could have ability to link related inventory and configurations affected by the incident | |||
| Must allow notification of high priority Incidents to multiple associates (Support Groups) | |||
| Must support automatic escalation of unresolved Incidents as per predefined time intervals | |||
| Facilitate the use of knowledge base & support check lists for Incident diagnosis and Resolution | |||
| Could have ability to automate the calculation of priority based on defined business impact and urgency factors | |||
| Could Change SLA/Priority of an Incident at any given time | |||
| Changes to Priority are tracked via reporting | |||
| Could Provide opening a service request from an incident record & to link the service request to that incident record. Similarly for problem, change and release records | |||
| Are user satisfaction measurement for incidents are automated using surveys. | |||
| Easily Copy incident resolutions to knowledge base | |||
| Incident record contains a field to record closure categorization and root cause at time of closure of incidents | |||
| Full history audit for the incident life cycle for key actions | |||
| Ability to auto create new tasks, when Incident Status changes to a specific state | |||
| Could Integrate with Service Level Management to monitor and track incident response time and resolution time based on priority and / or service levels | |||
| Could Integrate with Configuration Management Systems or CMDBs to enable the Service Desk Staff to identify, investigate and diagnose incidents | |||
| Request Management | |||
| System should Could Provide – following Major activities in managing Service Requests: | |||
| Ability to change Service Request form based on Service Item, without any programming for populating specific field for data capture. | |||
| Dynamic fields on the Service request form, should have conditional expressions, which populate custom Drop Down Lists or Radio buttons, based on dynamic values of data. | |||
| Automatic/manual assignment of tickets to support staff based on availability, roster, holiday calendar & leave. | |||
| Alert notify support staff and end users | |||
| Ability to create multiple service requests, from a single service request form. | |||
| Enable the user to answer a satisfaction survey before closing the request. Only if the request is completed to the satisfaction of the requester, it Could be closed by the service desk | |||
| Support Multi-level Service Request Approvals prior to the request being fulfilled | |||
| Ability to auto create new tasks, when Service Request Status changes to a specific state | |||
| Enable Request Models to be set up for common requests, with auto multiple tasks initiation, when one service request is raised to automate complex requests like new employee joining | |||
| Approver Could nominate an Alternate Approver, without changing workflow | |||
| Send Escalation alert messages for ( Could Provide both functional & hierarchal escalation) on overdue service requests, at any stage of the request fulfillment life cycle | |||
| Integration with Service Level Management to track and ensure compliance with service level agreements (SLAs) | |||
| Have Configurable workflow for routing assignments as per pre-defined business rules | |||
| Users to have ability to request parts and Support Staff Could issue parts with real time inventory tracking | |||
| Work Orders or Tasks Could be created and assigned for fulfilling a service request | |||
| Ability to create multiple service requests, when 1 service request is created. | |||
| Have process for billing or cross-charging for the request being fulfilled for ongoing costs of Request Fulfillment E.g.: by division, by department, by location, against particular cost centers | |||
| Problem Management | |||
| Creation, modification, and closure of Problem records | |||
| Known error records Could be created and known errors are visible in ( CI / Asset records, incident records, change records and knowledge data) | |||
| Route and assign Problem records to pre-defined support staff or groups | |||
| Impact and urgency codes to be assigned to Problem records | |||
| progress tracking and monitoring of Problems | |||
| Escalates Problems after pre-defined thresholds of SLA’s have been breached | |||
| Support sequential record of diagnostic activities and symptoms of the fault | |||
| Have support for creation and use of problem models | |||
| Has incident trending for pro-active problem identification by having Could have ability to show historical and related incidents over time | |||
| Have Knowledge Management integration to support investigations, diagnoses, root cause analysis techniques, and creating / updating workarounds, temporary fixes and resolutions | |||
| Support generation of customizable mgmt. reports for trend analysis | |||
| Could have ability to associate and maintain relationships between Incidents, Known Error records and RFCs | |||
| If Change has been successfully implemented the closure of all linked Known Error / Problem records is automatically initiated | |||
| Problem resolution should include workarounds this information Could be visible in (CI / Asset records, incident records, knowledge data and service requests) | |||
| Change & Release Management | |||
| Should support changes processes and core ITIL best practices | |||
| Could have ability to record Request For Changes ( RFC ) | |||
| Should have customizable workflow features for approvals | |||
| Support evaluation of change request | |||
| Plan the change with necessary roll-back plans | |||
| Monitor the change request life cycle | |||
| Have Capability for scheduling changes | |||
| Auto-assignment, workflow, intelligent routing | |||
| Could Provide Routing of RFCs to the appropriate authorization bodies like Change Advisory Board (CAB) | |||
| Could have ability to approve or reject Changes online | |||
| Has ability to record Risks associated with Change | |||
| Allow recording of impact assessment information such as, embedding of attachments Related to financial/business/technical reviews | |||
| Provide an interface for planning and scheduling of all tasks and personnel associated with change | |||
| Could Provide recording of Change schedules for build, testing, and implementation | |||
| Record back-out procedures within the Change record | |||
| Could Provide the planning, management and successful rollout of approved changes using Release management | |||
| Calculate Risk Level Associated with Change, based on Risk Calculator. Risk Calculator, should be calculate risk based on weighted average | |||
| System Asset & Configuration Management | |||
| Have Support for management and use of CI baselines | |||
| Should be Integrated with Incident, Problem, Change, Release Management to enable the creation and maintenance of the linked relationships between CI Records and associated process records | |||
| Could Provide recording of CI details of varying complexity ( from simple to complex) | |||
| Support Asset acquisition – procurement, configuration and warranty tracking with a lifecycle management approach | |||
| Support complete asset lifecycle management – end to end | |||
| Has ability to manage all critical assets that drive the business (IT and non-IT assets) | |||
| Vendor and Manufacturer profiles tracking | |||
| IT Asset Discovery – Automated hardware and software detection must support for un-limited IT assets | |||
| Has ability to discover, verify, record, and control all Configuration Items (CIs) through their entire lifecycle | |||
| Could Provide all important CI Technical Attributes like Processor info, hard disks & RAM capacity | |||
| Could Provide all important software information such as applications installed, service packs, updates …etc. for each asset | |||
| Software License Management Support | |||
| Link assets to help desk tickets | |||
| Could Provide a unified platform for asset and service management | |||
| View Track receipts, manuals and asset documentation | |||
| Link assets to owners/locations/departments | |||
| Support Contract management (Annual Maintenance Contracts) | |||
| Could have ability to Manage inventory ownership, moves/adds/changes | |||
| Create inventories reports/graphs to analyze trends or distribution | |||
| Have Purchase Management integration with Asset management | |||
| Built-in Remote Support and Extensible user interface for linking to external support desktop management applications, remote control and monitoring tools | |||
| Generates notifications for staff depend on preventive schedule | |||
| Track purchase requests information’s details and link them with the related assets and vendors | |||
| Create sequential asset code series based on asset type or category | |||
| Dash board view available to view all tickets for a given asset | |||
| Assets Could be assigned to any owner in their lifecycle, with historical tracking of ownership | |||
| Support all contracts information and with email alerts before contract expiration | |||
| Procurement Management | |||
| Manage complete life cycle of parts for all IT Purchases | |||
| Track vendor profile information for easier orders for refills or replacements or any other issues | |||
| Users Could request parts via service request parts | |||
| Support Staff Could release the inventory of requested parts | |||
| Multiple Store Support | |||
| Complete Purchase Order Functionality | |||
| Multi-Currency Support | |||
| Automatic Alert Notifications | |||
| Alerts Could be raised if inventory falls below safety stock or re-order point | |||
| Has ability to support barcode Tracking Support | |||
| Handheld devices custom integration possible for Inventory Cycle Counting | |||
| Approval Work Flow | |||
| Contracts Management | |||
| Should support Supplier Contract Details for each Configuration item | |||
| Manage any type of contracts, hardware annual maintenance agreements, software license agreements, patent, material transfer agreement, intellectual property agreement | |||
| Contract Managers, IT Managers, Project Managers, and key decision makers Could access contract data from any web-browser | |||
| Link and Associate related Contracts together | |||
| Centralize and track Contracts according to your standard codes, categories, departments, locations, and more | |||
| Track contract costs and pricing information | |||
| Used to help meet contract compliance, audits, and governance, such as Sarbanes Oxley (SOX), ISO, ITIL and State and Federal Regulations | |||
| Has ability to Import/Export data and integrate with common ODBC compliant databases and third party systems | |||
| Provide e-mail notifications for contracts, tasks, milestones, action items, and payments | |||
| Track payments and payment notifications | |||
| Track Vendors & 3rd Party Contacts Information | |||
| Support Vendor Login to request new contracts review notes, and upload documents | |||
| Track unlimited notes/comments | |||
| Has ability to have separate fields based on contract type | |||
| Has ability to support, search on any field via ad-hoc searching, search results Could be exported to Excel /PDF and other formats | |||
| Has ability to create reports with standard Report Builder | |||
| Help System with Online user manuals, demos and video tutorials | |||
| Has ability to link or copy contracts with a click of the mouse and link to previous versions to retain history | |||
| Could Provide workflow engine for online approvals & escalations | |||
| Has ability to support Calendaring integrated with contract notifications; exporting of Calendar to MS Outlook and of i-Calendaring systems | |||
| Has ability to provide access to contracts via mobile phones on specific platforms | |||
| Service Level Management | |||
| Tool must support process for recording Service Level Requirements | |||
| Could Provide capturing of information on business criticality & service level targets | |||
| Able to prioritize incidents, problems, changes based on SLA’s | |||
| Link clients and staff with holidays and work schedules | |||
| Provide a stated support level provided to group of users for given business service | |||
| Provide the administrators with simple SLA components to configure Service Level Targets, without need for dealing with programming code | |||
| Define multiple support centers, business working hours & holidays | |||
| Activities are adjusted based on operating hours, accounting for nights, weekends, & Holidays | |||
| Defines individual milestones; system initiates notification & escalation upon breach of SLA’s | |||
| Non availability of a technician will automatically re-assign incidents, problems & service requests by sending an email/sms alert to the alternate technician | |||
| Could Provide Escalation notification through multiple means including e-mail & sms phone text | |||
| Has ability for Application Administrator to configure escalation notification process | |||
| Could Provide information on service target breaches | |||
| Service Catalog Management | |||
| Ability to link custom forms to Service Catalog items | |||
| Ability to link custom fields to Service Catalog items | |||
| Ability to link custom check list questions to Service Catalog items | |||
| Could Provide a single source of consistent information on all production / live services. | |||
| Could Provide different views of the Service Catalog, such as Technical Service Catalog and Business Service Catalog | |||
| Could define services with associated features, benefits, service levels, pricing/costing, components. | |||
| Non-IT based people / Business users Could create service definitions, design service workflow and easily publish these services into the catalog | |||
| Could Provide structured content framework (services, subservices, etc). | |||
| Service dependencies / relations, highlights potential impact if a service is added, modified or deleted | |||
| Could Provide prepackaged Service Catalog content out of the box. | |||
| Configurable service definition templates / service models – out of the box. | |||
| Quickly find services via a search engine / key word search | |||
| Easy handle different service states (Like, services in design versus services in production / retired). | |||
| Self Help features like providing user training information like access instructions, entitlement and ordering instructions. | |||
| Create and track Service Requests and Incidents through the Service Catalog. | |||
| Out-of-the-box Service Catalog, that allows you to map your service offerings to the system as well as deliver, measure, and tune your services to meet the changing needs of your business | |||
| Publish your own Service Catalog for (IT / HR / Administrative / Procurement / Financial ) Services | |||
| Could have ability to record availability metrics (downtimes). Availability of Service to be calculated based on Incident Reporting | |||
| Define new service specific fields should be filled by users for service provision | |||
| Could have ability to publish different service levels for the same service (e.g.: Bronze, silver, gold, platinum levels ) | |||
| Easy to use Workflow tool, which Could Provide definition of service from initial request to fulfillment incorporating the Could have ability to support serial and parallel approval workflow paths. | |||
| Approvals for the pre-defined Services are obtained automatically, and the services are delivered and charged accordingly as per workflow rules | |||
| Measure service quality and timeliness against defined benchmarks Metrics for service targets (STs) defined in SLAs, OLAs and UCs for tracking and reporting. | |||
| Service Portfolio Management | |||
| Could Provide creation and management of service portfolio records | |||
| Could Provide SPM lifecycle stages of service pipeline, service catalogue and retired | |||
| Service Portfolio Integrate with Service Level Requirements (SLRs) | |||
| Could Provide recording of new service developments | |||
| Could Provide lifecycle management of services in the stages of defined, analyzed, approved and chartered | |||
| Could Provide recording of business cases as supporting documentation and information on Business processes supported, business owners, business users and value proposition. | |||
| Could Provide the recording, updating, monitoring and tracking of a Service’s transition statuses and activities | |||
| Could Provide lists of Business/Technical Services, Pipeline Services and Retired Services. | |||
| Could Provide recording of technical aspects of the services such as software applications used, IT owners, supporting services, dependent services, and, OLAs, UC contracts and service agreements | |||
| Could Provide recording of financial information about services, such as costs and charges. | |||
| Could Provide service inventory to be recorded | |||
| Could Provide Linking of Services to required capabilities and resources | |||
| Tool Could Integrate with IT Financial Management, Capacity Management and Demand Management processes to track actual number of users, service usage (consumption), service forecast and costs | |||
| IT Service Continuity Management | |||
| Could Support overall business continuity management (BCM) process by ensuring management of risks that could seriously affect IT services. | |||
| Could Support definition of minimum time for recovery, to be specified within which minimum levels of recovery are achieved. | |||
| Provides list of critical contracts that are required for the delivery of critical services | |||
| Provides list of services and/or vital business functions showing the recovery option for each. | |||
| Could record and plan service continuity test plan for each service and configuration items, that are to be carried out. | |||
| Could record the results of service continuity tests that have been carried out. | |||
| Could Support the development of a detailed recovery workflow for Service Continuity and Disaster Recovery activities | |||
| Could Support Service Continuity / Disaster Recovery hierarchical escalation and notifications | |||
| Could Integrate with Incident Management to enable the escalation of incidents to major incident or “disaster / crisis” status | |||
| Could Integrate with Knowledge Management databases to support controlled access to criteria to invoke ITSCM plans and to service recovery procedures. | |||
| SLAs and service targets Could be applied to for services Operating at a recovery site | |||
| Integrate with Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to enable rapid access to Configuration Item attribute details and relationships | |||
| Support the controlled distribution of ITSCM plans to key staff | |||
| Financial Management | |||
| Shows costs for individual services | |||
| Ability to record activities and time spent. | |||
| Could Support charging tiers based on service levels such as bronze, silver and gold. | |||
| Could Support different Cost Types such as, (Hardware purchases, Hardware maintenance, Software licenses, Software maintenance etc…) | |||
| Could Support Shared Service Model to allocate service costs to one or more business units | |||
| Ability to invoice based on time accounting and parts used. | |||
| Could integrate with Finance tools such as Oracle EBS, SAP, AX, QuickBooks, for purchasing, accounts payable, and accounts receivable/billing functions using web services or APIs | |||
| IT Projects Management | |||
| Could have ability to create projects | |||
| Could have ability to manage project portfolios | |||
| Record Business Justifications for project | |||
| Link Work Orders / Incidents / Service Requests / Change Records related to project | |||
| Add project activities using a simple interface | |||
| Visualize Gantt Chart for the project | |||
| Knowledge Management | |||
| Manage full life cycle of knowledge articles through (e.g., submission, editing, review, approval, publishing, usage monitoring, etc.) | |||
| Could Provide knowledge management capabilities by floating the most helpful articles to the top, in order of closest match to search | |||
| Automatically create knowledge articles from incident, problem and change modules | |||
| Rich-text editor (RTE) and web/ hyperlinks within knowledge documents and attach files and images to knowledge documents | |||
| Provide clients with 24/7 access to knowledgebase | |||
| Different knowledge-based views for SD staff and end users | |||
| Automatic cross reference to similar problems, with notice at data entry | |||
| Copy existing solutions from the knowledge base to the opened incident resolutions to automatically populate a knowledge article into an incident | |||
| File attachments and links Could be added, such as screenshots, internally stored documents, and internet-based information | |||
| Items in knowledge base Could be marked as FAQ’s / Checklists | |||
| Could have ability to launch fast knowledge searches using the categorization | |||
| Search based on keyword, Boolean string or string of characters, with wild cards | |||
| Easy to cross reference solutions for re-use | |||
| Could have ability to inactivate records of any sort, but Could still search and retrieve them | |||
| Technicians Could publish solutions to a knowledge base | |||
| Could Support recording of information about legislations such as for SOX, ISO 20000, ISO 27001 and others | |||
| Could Support creation and maintenance of links between related Knowledge Records | |||
| Allow user feedback to rate knowledge articles | |||
| Could Provide how often a Knowledge Record is accessed or used | |||
| Survey Management | |||
| Allow Delivery of Survey Invitations when an Incident or Service Request is closed | |||
| Manual Delivery of Surveys to Selected Audience | |||
| Create Multiple Different Survey Types | |||
| Have Unlimited User Defined Fields for Survey Questions : Drop-down, Radio Button, Checkbox, or Text Box Fields, Required or Optional Survey Questions, Required or Optional “Additional Information” Text Boxes | |||
| Survey Invitations Could be send via Email | |||
| Allow Customizable Email Invitations & “Thank You” Verbiage | |||
| Could Provide Analysis in form of Graphical Survey Results | |||
| Reporting & Dashboards | |||
| Built in reporting and configurable Dashboards | |||
| Has pre-defined reports | |||
| Has ability to make custom reports, without need for buying expensive reporting software’s | |||
| Reports Could be exported as .csv, .xls, XML, TIFF, web archive and pdf Formats | |||
| System Administration Features | |||
| Should have Simplified System Administration | |||
| User-friendly processes, terminology and features | |||
| Assign different views, forms to staff or group | |||
| Ability to add new fields on forms, based on service catalog | |||
| Provide administrators the Has ability to enable/ disable Users account | |||
| Has ability to support administrator role that Could Provide for complete system access | |||
| Search database to retrieve records based on any field | |||
| Email notifications sent to users based on rules | |||
| Email Listener – To convert emails to incidents & service requests | |||
| Email notifications sent to staff based on rules | |||
| Access levels and privileges for accounts | |||
| User fields/function keys to allow easy customization | |||
| Spell checker for free form text entry fields | |||
| Easy cut, copy, paste from email to ticket, and easily automate ticket from emails | |||
| Support attachments and URL’s | |||
| Frequently asked questions (FAQ) system | |||
| Provide administrator with Has ability to segregate group’s data based on roles | |||
| Automate business processes and build workflows | |||
| Create service-based business rules | |||
| Dynamic form creation based in required data / service | |||
| Ability to change Application Theme at Organizational or User Level |
Based upon research of internal consultants, research of Knowledge Apple Consultants, all of the above feature mention are available Out of the Box in Smart ServiceDesk, SmartServiceDesk.co Solution and has been verified to be implemented at multiple sites, such as following companies:
IT System Integrators
Banks
Government Sector
Defense
Private Sector
Schools & Universities
Blood Banks
Hospitals
Insurance
BPO Companies