The integration of TFS with ServiceNow enhances collaboration between the customer service and development teams. This, in turn, helps resolve the customer issues faster and gives visibility to both teams into customer priorities.
Integration overview
In an Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) ecosystem, the choice of systems and the collaboration between the cross-functional teams play a great role. While the choice of systems impacts the productivity of a team, the cross-functional collaboration helps the teams get complete context of the business requirements.
Best-of-breed systems such as TFS and ServiceNow bring rich functionalities to the ecosystem. By integrating TFS with ServiceNow, enterprises can diminish collaboration barriers between development and customer service teams that otherwise lead to quality issues, delivery delays, and financial loss.
How TFS – ServiceNow integration is beneficial for an enterprise
- Real-time access to customer issues and priorities
- Communication on the workitems from the native systems itself
- Real-time updates when a customer issue is resolved
With TFS + ServiceNow integration, enterprises can:
How OpsHub Integration Manager integrates TFS and ServiceNow
OpsHub Integration Manager integrates TFS and ServiceNow bi-directionally. It ensures that all historical and current data is available to each user, in that user’s preferred system, with full context, in real-time. All ‘tickets’ from ServiceNow automatically synchronize to TFS and all the entities and details associated with the ‘tickets’ synchronize back to TFS.
Popularly synchronized entities
Use Case: TFS integration with ServiceNow
Problem statement: The support team receives a ticket from a customer, identifies it as a ‘problem’, and shares the details of the ‘problem’ with the development team via email. Three days later, a support team representative writes a follow-up email to the development team to check the status of the ‘problem’. The development team, then, updates the support team representative that the ‘problem’ was resolved two days back.
Solution: When TFS and ServiceNow are bi-directionally integrated using OpsHub Integration Manager, the status of the ‘problem’ would automatically change in ServiceNow as soon as its status is changed to ‘resolved’ in TFS.
- Multiple customers log tickets in ServiceNow citing similar Skype-related issues.
- The support team identifies these tickets and reports them as a ‘problem’ to the backend team.
- OpsHub Integration Manager synchronizes this ‘problem’ as a ‘bug’ in TFS.
- The backend team examines the defect and requests the service team for more information to resolve the bug.
- A customer support representative provides the requested information to the backend team.
- The backend team then provides a resolution for the ‘bug’ and marks the status of the ‘bug’ as ‘resolved’.
- The status of the ‘problem’ in ServiceNow also gets updated to ‘resolved’. The resolution provided by the backend team appears as a ‘comment’ in the comment section.
Benefits of integration for TFS and ServiceNow users
TFS users
- Traceability for business requirements throughout
the ALM tool chain - Visibility into customer issues and priorities
- No dependency on manual communication for
making decisions
ServiceNow users
- Access to the business requirements and associated updates from within ServiceNow
- Easy to categorize and transfer customer tickets to TFS
- No manual efforts needed to keep backend teams updated on customer issues and priorities