As part of the final project in my internship over Summer 2019, I worked with a team of 5 other interns in the development of a workflow aimed at streamlining the SaaS integration process in the company. In the past the entire process, from the selection of a Vendor to the actual implementation and aclimitization of the new SaaS, was incredibly cloudy and often open doors to security vulnerabilities. Although the different teams involved in each step of the way were fully aware and capable of completing their tasks, there was a communication gap that prevented the work from advancing.
We began the project by thoroughly understanding the problem at hand. Through extensive meetings with teams that had undergone projects involving implementation of SaaS's, we were able to piece together what the current state of the process looked like and identify where we would be able to improve it. We noticed that each team that we interviewed had undertaken their project in a different way, and we quickly understood that there was no structured guidelines for the teams to follow and they simply did what they thought the next logical step was.
As part of my team's mission, we wanted to focus on making effective and tangible suggestions that we were confident would positively impact the process, and ultimately allow the company to levarage emerging technology at scale. As part of our end deliverable, we created an end-to-end workflow that represents each step of the process, and allows the teams to fully visualize where they are and where they need to go next.
A couple of crucial improvements to the process that I'd like to point out:
- The creation of a SaaS Committee to own and oversee the entire process
- Separation of the process into different stages
- Integration with ServiceNow
- Expected Documentation at each stage