To All CA Service Management Community Members --
In the recent CA Service Desk Manager Customer Feedback Survey, we asked how we could improve your experience using CA Service Desk Manager, and potential areas for improvement. Many of you provided valuable feedback and pointed out areas where you would like to see improvement. As a result of your insights, we would like to share what we have been and are doing.
Your most frequently mentioned areas for improvement were product quality, product usability, and ease of upgrading. These areas are top-of-mind for the entire CA Service Management solution team. With the latest release of CA Service Management 14.1, we believe you will see noticeable improvements in these areas.
Our focus on product quality improvement includes the adoption of Agile and the Scaled Agile Framework for Enterprise (SAFe) processes across the entire CA Service Management solution suite. Operationally we have brought the Sustaining Engineering team into the Development organization to ensure program alignment. At the same time, we have improved our testing processes, increasing the amount of automation and working with customers to replicate real-world environments to improve coverage and quality. These approaches are enabling us to design and build better software that works the way you expect.
To address your concerns around ease of upgrading, CA Service Management 14.1 introduced the Common Installer. This process examines your environment, determines what is needed for a successful upgrade, installs all of the components of the solution, and then integrates them automatically, eliminating many formerly manual and potentially error-prone steps. We have streamlined the use of items such as Java/JRE and Tomcat, and the entire solution uses the same versions of these components, and others, such as CA Business Intelligence and CA Process Automation. We will continue to bring a new approach to upgrading in future releases.
In collaboration with our world-class CA Support team, many specific areas for improvement have been identified, and new tools and approaches have been created to assist with troubleshooting and analyzing our solutions in your real-world complex environments. CA Support is involved very early and throughout the development life-cycle to address the “supportability” of new features and functions.
With the release of CA Service Management 12.9 in November 2013 and CA Service Management 14.1 in November 2014, we have addressed over forty (40) of your Community Ideas in CA Service Management. We continue to groom the Community Ideas and encourage you to vote on those Ideas you believe will provide the highest business value. While we will never be able to include every Idea, we hope you feel that your input and feedback is being recognized and acted upon.
We have transitioned all new documentation for CA Service Management to the CA wiki (wiki.ca.com). The wiki provides a fully indexed and searchable repository for almost all artifacts associated with CA Service Management including documentation, green books, technical appendices, what’s new, known errors, and the support matrix. No longer encapsulated in static PDF files, the wiki allows for contextual search, and you are able to provide feedback to the content, which is evaluated by our Technical Information team.
To address your concerns regarding a more intuitive user interface, CA Service Management 14.1 introduced Unified Self-Service. Primarily the single-pane-of-glass for business end-users, Unified Self-Service also includes common solution administrative tasks for such items as accounts, groups, email, and tenants. Our forward thinking for future releases, based on your feedback, revolve around personalization, theming, and configurability. Coupled with our recent extensive ethnographic research, these items represent areas of focus, and have not been committed to a particular release.
In the very near future, we will be conducting planned end-of-sprint demonstrations, giving you a first look at new features and functionality. You can also take advantage of our solution validation programs where you can gain early access to new features, test them and provide feedback, helping us further improve product quality. Be sure to sign-up for CA Service Management TUCSON today.
Please be assured we are actively listening to your feedback and putting the appropriate actions in place to address your concerns.
On behalf of the entire CA Service Management solution team, thank you for taking the time to complete the CA Service Desk Manager Customer Feedback Survey and providing your honest and candid feedback.