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By bringing together ITSM and PPM on a single platform, the City was able to adjust capacity to achieve more without additional resources.
Before Velentix, the city didn’t have clear data around tickets and projects. Now they have the data to be able to better prioritize projects and increase time to value.
The no-code nature of the platform reduced the administrative overhead for the IT team and have been “low lift” for ongoing management and expansion to ESM.
Industry: Public Sector
Previous System: Sharepoint
The City of Worcester transformed its disjointed IT operations into a mature, ITIL-aligned service management powerhouse with Velentix. By implementing a unified IT Service Management (ITSM) and Project Portfolio Management (PPM) platform, the city moved beyond basic ticketing, established critical change management processes, and laid the groundwork for enterprise-wide service efficiency.
In 2022, Samantha Sendrowski, the newly appointed Director of IT Administration for the City of Worcester, MA, faced a significant mission: modernizing the city’s IT Service Management. With a strong background in the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework, she recognized the urgent need to move beyond foundational ticketing and build a strategic, efficient IT organization. The city’s journey from operational disarray to ITSM maturity, powered by its partnership with Velentix, serves as a powerful model for public sector maturity transformation.
Upon her arrival, Sendrowski found an IT department operating at a “basic ticketing level,” hindered by widespread inefficiencies and a lack of strategic oversight. “When I joined, our processes were very disjointed, and some didn’t exist,” she recalled. “Most people here had not heard of ITIL.”
The challenges were numerous and deeply interconnected:
“The biggest challenge for us was really kind of knowing where to start,” Sendrowski said. The path forward required a comprehensive solution that could bring order to the chaos.
The City of Worcester adopted a strategic, people-centric approach to modernization, selecting Velentix as its unified platform for both ITSM and PPM. “The biggest thing that we were looking for when evaluating different vendors was having ITSM and PPM together,” explained Sendrowski.
The implementation of Velentix was methodical and focused on high-impact areas first.
Now that we can see our service desk data better, we can see that the scope of services we offer has increased, but not necessarily our headcount. To address this, we use the data we now have to better allocate our resources and offset some of it with self-service.
The transformation began by addressing the most significant risk. “We did start with change management since it was the least mature and we felt that there was the greatest risk not having it,” Sendrowski said. Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) were rolled out almost immediately, creating a foundation of stability.
A core principle of the rollout was collaboration. The team made sure all technology staff were involved in process discussions from the beginning, tapping into valuable tribal knowledge to understand existing workflows and pain points.
A half-day service catalog workshop proved to be a pivotal “aha moment” according to Sendrowski. Using sticky notes, the team visually mapped out every service they provided—an exercise that revealed the true breadth and depth of their work for the first time.
To make the task manageable, they applied the Pareto principle, focusing on the top 80% of the most common service requests identified from existing (though imperfect) help desk data. This exercise also prompted a crucial shift in perspective: designing the catalog based on how end-users search for services, using non-technical language.
To empower users and reduce ticket volume, the team built a new knowledge base from the ground up. By analyzing old help desk data, they identified “low drag” items ripe for self-service, such as multi-factor authentication issues, which generated “50 or 60 tickets a year,” Sendrowski explained.
The city launched the portal with a target of 50 articles to start and a communications plan to drive adoption.
Since partnering with Velentix, the City of Worcester has made remarkable strides, progressing from basic ticketing to embracing ITIL with change management. The integrated platform provided the visibility and tools needed to drive tangible improvements across the IT organization and beyond, including:
The City of Worcester’s modernization journey demonstrates the power of a unified platform and a strategic, people-first approach. By leveraging Velentix, Sendrowski and her team have not only matured their IT processes but have also positioned IT as a strategic enabler for the entire city.
“Our role as IT leaders is enabling the city to be more effective through technology and ESM is just a part of that,” she affirmed.
The partnership continues to evolve, with plans to formalize knowledge article curation by assigning staff a goal of one article a month or one article a quarter. As the city expands its use of Velentix to other departments like HR and facilities, the holistic view provided by an integrated ITSM and PPM platform will be crucial for driving cross-departmental efficiency and collaboration.
Want to hear more about how a unified, no-code platform can transform your organization? Check out this webinar with the City of Worcester:
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