Anyone currently use Cherwell Service Mgmt Ticketing Software

HailHogwash

My Org is moving away from HP Service MGMT which is horrid to a new ticketing system - Cherwell. Does anyone have any experiences with this software?

TWX

After about a year we're leaving it.

Cherwell's strength is that it is infinitely customizable. It's terrible weakness is that it must be heavily customized, and it's very easy to overwrite other users' customizations if people are careless.

If you do go with it, make sure that you study the defaults thoroughly and don't reinvent the wheel where the defaults work. For example, if the names of your sections or departments don't match the built-in names but the built-in names correspond well with duties, just go with the defaults and accept the name mismatch. If you attempt to create "networking" because "network services" doesn't match you'll face headaches.

Also, plan on spending considerable time tweaking it once it's installed, and listen to the people in each section for what they need.

Lastly, make sure you have enough licenses. It's a pain when you don't.

Phileeeeeeep651

My company rolled it out about 5 months ago, transitioning from HP Service Desk and well... It's different. It's not terrible and like TWX said, pretty much everything can be customized.

My only problem was the implementation of it, only specific team members were given advanced access, those team members didn't provide any feed back to the Cherwell team so we're still dealing with certain processes that could have easily been automated, those team members also didn't do any sort of documentation or training so when roll-out came it was pretty much "Here it is, figure it out". I guess that's not really a software problem but I think it's left a bad taste in my mouth because of the issues we've had.

Lastly, make sure you have enough licenses. It's a pain when you don't.

THIS! Unless you really enjoy logging back in every 45 min.

HailHogwash

thanks both for you replies. So far we are testing it and its definately an improvement from HPSM- do not know if this is same as HP Service Desk.

TWX wrote: »

if the names of your sections or departments don't match the built-in names but the built-in names correspond well with duties, just go with the defaults and accept the name mismatch. If you attempt to create "networking" because "network services" doesn't match you'll face headaches.

From the looks of it they have customized the various departments and not defaults from what i can tell, I hope thats not a precursor to trouble in the future. @TWX By the way why is your company abandoning it and what are you going to?

TWX

We're leaving it because no one able is making it work, and no one willing knows how to make it work.

This is what happens when the maintainer of the ticket system does not use the ticket system. This was what was wrong with the previous system as well, and I am not hopeful about the next ticket system either.

blargoe

TWX wrote: »

After about a year we're leaving it.

Cherwell's strength is that it is infinitely customizable. It's terrible weakness is that it must be heavily customized, and it's very easy to overwrite other users' customizations if people are careless.

If you do go with it, make sure that you study the defaults thoroughly and don't reinvent the wheel where the defaults work. For example, if the names of your sections or departments don't match the built-in names but the built-in names correspond well with duties, just go with the defaults and accept the name mismatch. If you attempt to create "networking" because "network services" doesn't match you'll face headaches.

Also, plan on spending considerable time tweaking it once it's installed, and listen to the people in each section for what they need.

Lastly, make sure you have enough licenses. It's a pain when you don't.

We very recently rolled out Cherwell and are still releasing functionality in sprints. I'm not involved in the management of the platform, but I can say that TWX's assessment is pretty much right on target with what I have seen so far... the customization can be both a strength and a weakness. The decision makers chose this product because they decided they needed a product with the capability to be this customizable. While most of those needs are being met, the same types of headaches mentioned in the quoted post are inevitable. It must be difficult to get some of the logic correct on the forms, because we wind up with completely illogical/invalid settings in our tickets at times, we don't always get notifications of new items, dashboards don't always show all of our work items, etc.

That's said, it is light years better than what we were using before (a home grown Lotus Notes database... yikes!). I think most of our issues are related to deviating from OOB for core functionality like TWX said.