Podcast with Derek Sutton
Prefer to listen to the case study? Derek Sutton of SickKids Foundation tells hosts Ryan Spilken and Harp Athwal all about his organisation's digital transformation using Jira Service Management.
SickKids Foundation embraces digital transformation with Jira Service Management
How Adaptavist teamed up with Atlassian to help one of Canada's largest foundations pursue a radical digital transformation using Jira Service Management and a migration to Cloud.
Digital transformations can be daunting at the best of times - particularly when it involves uplifting years or even decades worth of established systems and ways of working. SickKids Foundation, one of Canada’s largest fundraisers, wanted to scale their fundraising but were reaching the limit of what their current work processes could achieve.
With Adaptavist’s experience and know-how in implementing Atlassian’s Jira Service Management, SickKids were in SAFe hands to undertake their digital transformation and even take the opportunity to look at the bigger picture and transform the way their teams worked forever.
The challenge
SickKids Foundation had managed one of the largest fundraising operations in Canada for a long time using the simplest of systems: phone and email. As their fundraising efforts grew, the increasing complexity revealed the need for a more intentional digital transformation for immediate improvements and long-term success.
The volume and complexity of SickKids' work necessitated an improvement on the existing solution. Jira Service Management had already been earmarked as a potential complement to their existing Atlassian stack, a decision that was only reinforced when Adaptavist joined the initiative to support implementation.
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How Adaptavist teamed up with Atlassian to help SickKids Foundation embrace digital transformation
Implementing an organised and automated service management solution
SickKids Foundation were desperate to overhaul their existing manual processes and reliance on ad-hoc workflows, however, before that began, Adaptavist worked to update and tidy-up SickKids’ existing Jira and Confluence instances, laying the foundation for the new service management solution.
Then came the work to switch SickKids over to a central and streamlined service management platform using Jira Service Management Cloud Premium, starting with the Legal, Brand Strategy, and Stewardship and Donor Relationships teams.
While each team uses Jira Service Management for slightly different purposes, they've all experienced remarkable improvements compared to their old ways of working. The historical reliance on emails has now gone, and as Derek Sutton, Director of Infrastructure and Enterprise Architecture, puts it: “We've managed to reduce the volume of emails for requests and incidents by over 95% in the nine months since we launched." SickKids were now in a position to support their fundraisers faster, and manage their work in a more seamless manner.
We’ve managed to reduce the volume of emails for requests and incidents by over 95% in the nine months since we launched.
Derek Sutton
Director of Infrastructure and Enterprise Architecture at SickKids Foundation
Migrating the Foundation’s Atlassian solutions to the cloud
SickKid's leadership had a specific mandate to get on the cloud, motivated by business goals and personal passions.
During the time Adaptavist was helping SickKids implement Jira Service Management, they also worked on moving the foundation's full Atlassian solution to the cloud. Partly to enable remote work in the short term but also to support the organisation's farther-reaching future objectives. Having moved to the cloud, SickKids' cloud platforms have already improved system availability, resilience, and remote capabilities while setting the required foundations for long-term success.
The benefits of working on the cloud didn't stop there either. Adaptavist encouraged SickKids to use the migration as an opportunity to consider the big picture, too. As Rodolfo Romero, Senior Technical Consultant at Adaptavist, says, "We look at cloud migrations not as a transfer of the way that you work on-premise, but as an opportunity to rethink all the service management processes and procedures that you have implemented."
Together, Adaptavist and SickKids explored ways to extend the foundation's Atlassian suite and improve other processes. As a result, the team leveraged their service management solution to expedite incident and change management — with the view to adopting additional capabilities in Jira Service Management at a later date.
We look at cloud migrations not as a transfer of the way that you work on premise, but as an opportunity to rethink all the service management processes and procedures that you have implemented.
Rodolfo Romero
Senior Technical Consultant at Adaptavist
A foundation for future success
Thanks to Jira Service Management and Adaptavist's help in implementing the tool, SickKids was able to move away from a reliance on emails and from an unscalable way of working. Everything was in place for fundraising success.
Interested in learning more about SickKid's digital transformation and success with Jira Service Management?