Centralizing IT service delivery

Flight Centre Travel Group is one of the world’s largest travel retailers and corporate travel managers. Headquartered in Brisbane, Australia, the group operates an advanced network of leisure and corporate travel services across four major regions, including Australia and New Zealand, the Americas, EMEA, and Asia.

As with other travel operators, Flight Centre experienced major disruption during the COVID-19 pandemic. This led to significant layoffs across its business, including much of its IT Service Management team. As business rebounded after the pandemic, Flight Centre started to rebuild the team, creating an influx of new employees who weren’t familiar with the company’s tailored IT processes. At the same time, the company decided to shift from a regional IT model to a centralized approach, creating an Enterprise Technology Systems (ETS) team to deliver core IT infrastructure services to the rest of the business across the globe.

Knowledge gaps created change management challenges and risks

This combination of inexperience and organizational change hampered the way Flight Centre delivered IT services. Nowhere was this more apparent than with change management. According to Sabina Galant, ITSM Team Leader at Flight Centre, “We use ServiceNow for ITSM as well as other functions within IT. It’s an excellent platform and exactly what we need to drive world-class IT processes, but our people need to understand these processes and how to use the platform. That’s exactly the problem we had with change management in ETS. Due to this lack of familiarity, many people were dissatisfied, and some didn’t use ServiceNow at all. We ended up with a lot of unapproved changes, which was a significant risk to our business. And because we weren’t even capturing all of these changes, we couldn’t easily quantify the risk we faced and lacked confidence.”

Closing the knowledge gap with ServiceNow User Adoption process training

Although Sabina was new to Flight Centre, her deep experience told her that she had to address this gap. For Sabina, the answer was ServiceNow User Adoption training. She explains, “I had already worked with the ServiceNow training team at my previous employer, and I knew what they could deliver. I approached them, and they came back with a proposal that included everything I needed. This was critical input to my business case, which was quickly approved.”

The ServiceNow training team then worked closely with Sabina to build out the training plan and content. “I was really impressed by how ServiceNow partnered with us to understand our change processes and develop content that supported this,” Sabina says. “This isn’t about out-of-the-box training. It’s tailored to the way we do business, which makes it far more relevant and useful for our people. And it came together really quickly—we were ready to start delivery just eight weeks after the initial kickoff.”

Great feedback and great results

ServiceNow delivered three live regional training sessions to approximately 100 ETS team members. The ServiceNow team also prepared a set of demonstration videos covering different aspects of Flight Centre’s change processes, as well as quick reference guides that ETS team members could keep on their desks. Sabina notes, “The training sessions went really well, and we had great feedback. In fact, many people told us that the training was a real eye-opener. And I can’t say enough about the quick reference guides—they’re just fantastic.”

Sabina is equally enthusiastic about the results. She says, “We’ve seen a major jump in change quality. There are far fewer unapproved changes, and there is a corresponding reduction in failed changes. Why? Because people now understand our change processes and are happy with the ServiceNow platform.  We also use the same ServiceNow training content for new employees, which means that everyone starts off on the right foot as soon as they come aboard.”

ServiceNow User Adoption training is poised to deliver broader benefits across Flight Centre

Sabina’s training initiative has gained widespread attention, both within ETS and more broadly. She elaborates, “User Adoption training really transformed the quality of our change management—so much so that other teams in ETS, such as our incident team, are also planning on using ServiceNow User Adoption training. And our change management is running so well that some of the business units that use ETS services are also looking at using our processes for their own changes. That’s really important—it means we’re starting to adopt consistent IT change management best practices across our entire business, which is going to lower risk even further and simplify how we operate.”