Modernizing IT service delivery

McKesson Corporation is a diversified health care services company dedicated to advancing patient health outcomes. Headquartered in Irving, Texas, the company and its 51,000 employees partner with biopharma companies, care providers, pharmacies, manufacturers, and governments to deliver insights, products, and services that help make quality care more accessible and affordable.

McKesson relies on IT to help deliver the healthcare innovations and services its customers depend on. The company has a hybrid IT operating model, with a centralized group and teams embedded in individual business units. While this model empowered business stakeholders, it also led to duplicate systems and corresponding high maintenance costs. That’s why McKesson chose ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) to consolidate and modernize its IT support systems while still maintaining its distributed operating model.

Considering third-party training options

McKesson needed to drive high levels of ServiceNow adoption to ensure the success of this initiative. To empower its IT agents, the company invested in training from a third-party provider. However, when the training was delivered, it quickly became apparent that it wasn’t fit for purpose. According to Danielle Cooper, Senior Director, Service Enablement at McKesson, “All we had were recorded training sessions that went on for hours. The content wasn’t task oriented, so there were no easy answers to questions like how to open a ticket. It also wasn’t tailored for McKesson, so our agents were left asking what it meant for them in Q&A sessions. And, there were no quick reference guides—so, when agents needed help later on, there was nothing they could turn to.”

Addressing a negative business impact

Because the recorded sessions were so long, many agents skipped training. And because agents didn’t know how to use ServiceNow, they became increasingly frustrated, which created a negative perception of the new system. Danielle’s team ended up giving lots of additional ad hoc training to bridge the gap, which was a drain on the team.

Danielle explains, “We were obviously happy to help our agents, but that meant we didn’t have time to focus on rolling out ServiceNow other business units. And, with 4,000 agents, this approach obviously didn’t scale. Additionally, our whole initiative was starting to get a bad reputation, which was the last thing that we wanted. We knew we’d made the right platform choice with ServiceNow, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to convince other business units that we’d provide the necessary support to enable them to come on board.”

ServiceNow custom training videos fill the gap quickly

To address this escalating problem, Danielle and her team turned to ServiceNow. The ServiceNow team recommended a set of six short custom training videos focused on individual process areas, along with leave-behind guides. For Danielle, this seemed like the right approach, so she asked ServiceNow to move forward with the proposal.

Danielle is enthusiastic about the results. She explains, “ServiceNow was super responsive and delivered everything in six weeks. And a lot of that was delays on our side, providing process feedback and guidance. We’ve had really positive feedback, and my team doesn’t have to give additional training sessions anymore. We’ve also turned around the reputation issue and onboarded additional business units since we started using the custom ServiceNow training. It also makes it so easy to scale and onboard new hires. A few weeks ago, we had an operating model change and needed to bring another 130 service managers on board. All we had to do was send out an email telling them how to access the training resources. The type of custom training that ServiceNow delivers makes it easy for people to self-serve, which is a huge advantage.”

Ongoing success with customized training

McKesson has continued to grow its ServiceNow platform, extending into other areas such as IT operations, IT asset management, governance, risk, and compliance (GRC), and legal. Most recently, the company started to use ServiceNow for HR service delivery, and custom ServiceNow training was an integral part of that launch as well. Danielle explains, “It was a huge success with ITSM, so why wouldn’t we do the same thing again? It’s a great way to use our ServiceNow Learning Credits, and our people get high-quality, targeted training that makes them feel really supported. And, once again, the feedback has been very positive.”

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