Streamlining the onboarding experience
Established in 1985, the New Zealand Parliamentary Service provides administrative and support services to elected members of Parliament (MPs) and the House of Representatives. It also administers funding entitlements for MPs and offers services to other organizations that support Parliament and ministerial offices. In the current 54th New Zealand Parliament, six parliamentary parties are represented by 123 MPs.
The New Zealand Parliamentary Service oversees a multitude of services for Parliament. These include finance, ICT, human resources, library services, building facilities, and parliamentary engagement. However, in a fluctuating parliamentary environment, this often involves frequent changes with high levels of urgency. For example, new MPs need to be onboarded quickly after every general election.
“We often get a phone call at 4 p.m. about someone starting 8:30 a.m. the next day, so providing access to appropriate resources and security permissions need to be seamless,” says Josh Sinclair, CIO, Parliamentary Service. “By uniting employee services on the Now Platform, we gain greater transparency and speed in case resolution. MPs can now get the help they need much faster.”
Unifying employee services on one platform
Before ServiceNow, the Parliamentary Service used multiple email inboxes to manage service requests from a range of functions, such as IT, HR, library services, the customer center, communications, and publicity.
The IT service desk was also outsourced to a third-party vendor that often took days, or even weeks, to respond to service requests. With disconnected systems and tools, onboarding and offboarding parliamentary members involved numerous manual steps for time-sensitive tasks like helping MPs return equipment and move offices after an election.
“We previously had to follow a 70-page workflow with the legacy customer service management system (CRM) to get things moving. There was no way of knowing when something was stuck or where it was up to,” Josh says. “A new MP could start work without a device for days. This led to staff frustration and a poor onboarding experience.”
With the change of New Zealand Government in 2023, the Parliamentary Service wanted a single platform to automate, simplify, and connect processes, and make it easier to onboard and offboard parliamentary members.
Through the consolidation of 11 email inboxes into a new unified online portal, Ātea, underpinned by ServiceNow Employee Center Pro, the Parliamentary Service now has a one-stop shop for employees to easily access a range of services and self-serve information through HR Service Delivery (HRSD) and IT Service Management (ITSM). This helps accelerate case resolution time and provide a seamless onboarding experience.
For example, when a request is submitted via the portal to onboard a new MP, ServiceNow automatically creates a case and work order task, enabling the service team to assign tasks to the right team for resolution. This helps reduce the average response time from weeks to just two days. It also makes it faster for the service team to get the information they need from respective managers, such as what device the MP will need or what distribution lists should be added to before starting a new job in Parliament.
“Having a unified portal on the ServiceNow platform, we have simplified the way our employees access services and significantly improved their onboarding experience,” Josh explains. “MPs can now have an IT device on day one instead of waiting for days.”
Driving self-service while improving employee experience
With over 80% of cases submitted via email in a year, improving self-service rates for employee services is at the heart of the Parliamentary Service’s digital revolution.
Using Service Catalog and Knowledge Management within Employee Center Pro, 37 services, 100 IT catalog items, and 37 knowledge articles are now available through the Ātea online portal. The Parliamentary Service has also developed a knowledge base for 2023 Speaker’s Directions, providing a single place for MPs to quickly find information related to funding entitlements without logging a request.
“The automated workflows within the Now Platform make it simple and fast for employees to find relevant information,” Josh explains. “Service teams can also track and manage requests in a single place rather than multiple sources, helping them to uplift their productivity.”
A post-election change of government can be a challenging moment for MPs navigating their career. ServiceNow Employee Journey Management allows the Parliamentary Service to personalize onboarding and offboarding processes and provide better support for MPs transferring between departments or leaving Parliament.
The Parliamentary Service has also been leveraging Now Platform dashboards to monitor team performance in real time and improve service delivery.
“Thanks to the intuitive dashboards, we can easily track the request types and volumes that our teams are working on at any given time,” Josh says. “This allows us to prioritize jobs and improve our teams’ abilities to fulfill requests within their SLAs.”
While the service teams are already using user satisfaction surveys for IT service performance, the Parliamentary Service has also started using Employee Center Pro to collect in-the-moment feedback from employees to measure their experience.
Accelerating transformation with an optimized platform
With the move to a single platform, the Parliamentary Service has also deployed ServiceNow Impact to achieve higher platform performance and drive innovation.
Josh says, “Having a dedicated Customer Success Manager to coach us throughout the Impact journey, and make sure that we have all the information we need to manage our platform, is truly valuable.”
As part of the portal project, the Parliamentary Service used an Impact accelerator to help adopt Employee Center Pro faster.
“We’ve recently completed our Jumpstart Your Employee Center accelerator for the portal refresh project. Using Impact Accelerators, we have access to experts and content that’s not available anywhere else,” says Josh. “Receiving hands-on guidance from experts gives the organization confidence that we are configuring the right things and not missing out on opportunities and new features available in the Now Platform.”
The Parliamentary Service also uses the platform health tools in Impact to help maintain the high performance of the platform. By replacing a monitoring dashboard with Impact Instance Observer, the Parliamentary Service now has 24/7 monitoring capability to track instance health and performance while gaining access to historical insights. This has boosted its ability to make enhancements in-house and ensure service availability.
The Parliamentary Service also leveraged the TuneUp Your Security accelerator to provide detailed actionable insight that helped improve the platform’s security score.
“We definitely plan to use many more accelerators,” Josh notes. “Next on the roadmap is to kick off the Platform Analytics, AI Search, and IT Asset Management accelerators.”
Building a foundation to drive continuous improvement
The Parliamentary Service initially engaged with a ServiceNow partner, Red Moki, for the ITSM implementation. When EY New Zealand acquired Red Moki, they worked with the Parliamentary Service teams for the first and second phases of the HRSD project.
“EY has delivered a fit-for-purpose solution,” Josh says. “We are looking forward to a two-way relationship with the partner and delivering more value to the organization.”
Looking ahead, the Parliamentary Service will focus on completely moving away from its legacy CRM system and using ServiceNow as its single source of truth for people data.
“In the past, we only gave 10 people access to the legacy CRM system,” Josh says. “With ServiceNow, I’d like to give visibility to more people so we can further improve the employee service experience.”
Josh adds that due to staffing constraints, ServiceNow ITSM has primarily been used for incident management and hasn’t been leveraged to its fullest extent. The next priority is to maximize the use of ITSM features, such as Virtual Agent—the conversational AI-powered chatbot—and expand the use case to hardware and software requests.
“ServiceNow has a huge potential for process improvement—and not just IT,” Josh says. “Our plan is to make sure we don’t duplicate what we are doing in the platform and use more out-of-the-box functionalities.”
He concludes: “Overall, the Now Platform has enabled us to improve governance, operational efficiency, and employee productivity.”