In a challenging economic climate, Telvent Global Services faces a tough defy on two fronts. The first one is to provide high-quality IT services for Telvents parent company, Abengoa. This spans IT operations and infrastructure support throughout the IT lifecycle across 70 countries and 20,000 employees. The second one is to deliver world-class IT services to its 350 external clients. Both sets of clients outsource new projects into the Telvent data centres almost on a daily basis, each with its own unique platform environments, different levels of complexity, and diverse needs in terms of externalisation. We also have to take into account an internal merging process between two of Telvents business units.
In order to provide its internal and external clients with a consistent, high-quality, cost-effective approach to IT service management, Telvent deployed an IT service management system project, a set of processes, technologies and service oriented culture transformation. 
A project that has resulted in a complete return on investment in 15 months and a 370 percent return over two and a half years is great news by any measure. But when its backed by ISO 20000 certification, best-practice service management processes, and a satisfied, loyal, and growing client base, it becomes a truly exceptional project!
Telvent like many others services providers have seen this industry growing too fast in volume and complexity, raising the entropy/chaos levels, to keep this into levels where consistency and predictability in our IT services quality, but in order to achieve this we had to evolve from non-structured, silo-centric IT models toward predictive, organized, and efficient services provision.

In order to achieve these goals, we needed a comprehensive suite of IT Service Management solutions to rapidly create repeatable, efficient, and effective service management processes. The chosen solution also needed to drive the delivery of ISO 20000 certification.
The solution had to be seamlessly connected with ITIL best practice processes like service desk management, incident management, problem management, change management, and service level management, allowing us to view our IT components as interrelated parts of services provided to internal and external clients -- all with a single data model, workflow platform, and user interface for proactively managing not only Abengoas own heterogeneous IT infrastructure, but also that of the 350 other clients worldwide.
A multi-tenancy architecture was a must for us, taking into account that we had not only many external clients but many internal clients too, some of them in a merging process, others on their own. Thanks to the multi-tenancy functionality, Telvent was able to customize a process per client without development projects.
Our BMC Software ITSM Solution played a pivotal role in helping Telvent to achieve the ISO 20000 certification. It supported best practices, benchmarked managed services, measured service levels, optimized performance, decreased business risk and reduced the total cost of ownership. It enabled us to reduce SLA incident penalties by a total of $8,800 per month, to cut the time needed to plan, schedule, and deploy changes from three weeks to one week, to save the equivalent of five full-time equivalents (FTEs) staff members, and to reduce the number of system outages by 25 percent. 

Yes

Yes

One of the biggest goals reached by this project has been undoubtedly the transformation of the IT culture and legacy behaviours, in fact the primary responsible for what we call the fire fighting illness. Part of this transformation has been to evolve from non-structured, silo-centric IT models toward predictive, organized, and efficient services provision. 
Our people have understood that working on a process based system is in reality an advantage for many reasons. First of all, because their daily work is not under fire fighting pressure but follows organised processes. Secondly, because this adds value to their professional experience, and finally because they will have a much better understanding of what is expected from them. In effect, we have observed that our working conditions have improved; at least that is what our surveys are suggesting.

In general, there is no doubt that we have transformed the way we do business. ITIL processes make it easier to win customers, we can effectively manage whatever type of environment a customer needs, and we are coping with complexity. In the current tough economic conditions, these are real advantages that position Telvent to ride out whatever conditions we all might face.
When we designed our IT service management project, we wanted to have all necessary resources in place for customer to control their services, that is - transparency as an added value. Therefore, our customers now have much more visibility on our processes, more transparency, and this is very important in the outsourcing world. Customers want to know what you are doing with their infrastructure, because after all they delegate management but not responsibility. 
The benefits are measurable too. First, by aligning crucial IT infrastructure and service support processes, Telvent has been able to reduce the scale of SLA incident resolution penalties by a total of $8,800 per month. Second, BMC Remedy Change Management has played a pivotal role in accelerating the speed and consistency with which Telvent implements changes, while also minimizing business risk and disruption. 
Overall, the company has cut the time needed to plan, schedule, and deploy changes from three weeks to one week. This has had the effect of saving the equivalent of five full-time equivalent staff members, allowing them to be used for more business-critical work. Finally, Telvent is mitigating against risk far more effectively. Following the deployment of the BMC Remedy IT Service Management suite, the rate of system outages dropped by 25 percent, resulted in a 370 percent return during the two-and-a-half-year IT service management project lifecycle and saved $1.9 million, the equivalent of a complete return on investment in just 15.3 months.
Finally, another great aspect is that this project enables us to be positioned in the market as a high added-value provider.

Telvent is the first Spanish-based company to achieve an international recognised accreditation ISO 20000 and the first European company to achieve ISO 20000 certification on the latest release of BMC Remedy IT Service Management. 

	Delivered a 370 percent return during the two-and-a-half-year IT service management project lifecycle 
	Saved $1.9 million  the equivalent of a complete return on investment in 15.3 months

The project faced many obstacles, especially when we decided to do most of the work with internal resources. Our objective was to retain as much knowledge as we could in house as we did not want to have an ITSM project on a turnkey basis. In our experience, people usually get around when they see many consultancy services, and when they finish their job, the only thing left in the organisation is just technology.
The biggest and most important obstacle to overcome was the IT service management culture transformation; it required a formal change management subproject implementation. Different speeches and courses were created to reduce change resistance, from the technical engineer to the Board of Directors.

The benefits are measurable too. Firstly, by aligning crucial IT infrastructure and service support processes, Telvent has been able to reduce the scale of SLA incident resolution penalties by a total of $8,800 per month. Secondly, Change Management has played a pivotal role in accelerating the speed and consistency with which Telvent implements changes, while it minimizes business risk and disruption. Overall, the company has cut the time needed to plan, schedule, and deploy changes from three weeks to one week. This has had the effect of saving the equivalent of five full-time equivalent staff members, allowing them to be used for more business-critical work. Finally, Telvent is mitigating against risk far more effectively. 
Following the deployment of the project, the rate of system outages dropped by 25 percent. When you put together the process automation, the headcount savings, the improvement in service levels, and the reduced number of incidents, Telvent has saved $1.9 million through this project, the equivalent of a complete return on investment in just 15.3 months. Overall, we are forecasting a 370 percent return over the two-and-a-half-year IT service management project lifecycle. 
The service support solution also has enabled us to achieve ISO 20000 certification, the international standard for IT service management delivery. This ISO certification is a public recognition of the fact that Telvent is delivering best-practice, benchmarked managed services, measured service levels, and optimized performance.

Exceeded

In the current economic climate, people are looking for ways to become more agile and to make the most of their IT budgets and thats exactly what we have done with this project. Not only have we saved a lot of money, we have improved the quality of service we are providing to our customers and our competitiveness on the market. This IT project has positively impacted the ability of Telvent to offer a better service to our current customers and gain new ones.
The benefits are measurable too. First, by aligning crucial IT infrastructure and service support processes, Telvent has been able to reduce the scale of SLA incident resolution penalties by a total of $8,800 per month. Second, Change Management has played a pivotal role in accelerating the speed and consistency with which Telvent implements changes, while also minimizing business risk and disruption. Overall, the company has cut the time needed to plan, schedule, and deploy changes from three weeks to one week. This has had the effect of saving the equivalent of five full-time equivalent staff members, allowing them to be used for more business-critical work. Finally, Telvent is mitigating against risk far more effectively. 
Following the deployment of the project, the rate of system outages dropped by 25 percent. When you put together the process automation, the headcount savings, the improvement in service levels, and the reduced number of incidents, Telvent has saved $1.9 million through this project, the equivalent of a complete return on investment in just 15.3 months. Overall, we are forecasting a 370 percent return over the two-and-a-half-year IT service management project lifecycle. 
The service support solution also has enabled us to achieve ISO 20000 certification, the international standard for IT service management delivery. This ISO certification is public recognition for the fact that Telvent is delivering best-practice, benchmarked managed services, measured service levels, and optimized performance.

As any quality management implementation, the work never stops, and although we raised the maturity of our IT organisation, there is still much work to be done. Managers, technicians and even clients are still assimilating the changes and starting to work in a new way. Finally we will come to an understanding, what means that with a good and well explained process plan,  there is a general sensation that is this is the right thing to do.