Brooke achieves ISO/IEC 20000-1 Certification

Brooke is an international organisation dedicated to protecting and improving the lives of horses, donkeys, and mules, providing people in developing countries the opportunity to work their way out of poverty. With the help of Pink Elephant , Brooke successfully achieved ISO 20000-1 certification, transforming its IT Service Management (ITSM) practices to align with global standards.

Organisation Profile

• Industry: Charity, Animal Welfare
• Employees: 2,000 globally
• Head Office: UK
• Founded: 1934

Customer Benefits

• Achieved ISO 20000-1 Certification: Demonstrates world-class ITSM practices.
• Implementation of Advanced ITSM Tooling: Enhanced efficiency and service quality.
• Service Catalogue Improvement and Automation: Streamlined operations.
• Best Practice Education: Aligned ITSM processes with ITIL standards.

Background

Founded in 1934, Brooke has grown into an international organisation, helping over 1.5 million working horses, donkeys, and mules globally. The charity’s Information Services (IS) department, based in the UK with representatives in six other countries, faced significant challenges as it struggled to cope with the demands of rapid growth. The department operated under a ‘hub and spoke’ model, where the central ‘hub’ provided core services to the ‘spokes’ in different locations.

The Challenge

When Brian Lake became Head of Information Services at Brooke in 2016, he discovered that the organisation was not running as efficiently as it should for a global charity. The team was overwhelmed by a culture of fire-fighting, with high staff turnover, constant crises, and a lack of structured requests and incident management.

Brian noted:

“Turnover was quite high, people were getting stressed and everything was a crisis that needed to be done this afternoon. There were no requests – only incidents, and they were all urgent.”

A maturity assessment conducted by Pink Elephant revealed several issues, including a lack of project management, siloed working practices, and ad hoc communication methods that hindered asset control and change management.

Pink Elephant’s ITSM Consultant, Eddie Potts, recognized the need for a shift towards a more structured and professional service delivery model:

“What was needed was to get into more of an ordered, professional services delivery.”

The Solution

Over a five-year period, Pink Elephant guided Brooke through a comprehensive ITSM transformation. This included implementing enterprise ITSM tooling, redesigning processes, enhancing the service catalogue, and providing best-practice education, particularly in ITIL standards.

Brian Lake, impressed by Pink Elephant’s expertise, stated:

“Pink Elephant has a reputation for excellent training, and I’d walked the path to ITIL v3 expert with them. We knew that, when not teaching, they were consulting, so I reached out on that basis.”

Pink Elephant and Brian identified Freshservice as the ideal ITSM tool for The Brooke due to its affordability, flexibility, and iterative development model. This allowed for continuous enhancement of features and capabilities as The Brooke’s needs evolved.

Eddie Potts and Brian worked closely to map out processes for incident management, request management, and defining IS’s core services. The change management process was carefully handled, with Eddie playing a key role in easing the transition:

“Eddie was the more sympathetic party – if I’d ruffled too many feathers, I’d send Eddie because he was free of confirmation bias.”

The Result

Thanks to Pink Elephant’s guidance and the implementation of Freshservice, the Brooke charity successfully achieved ISO 20000-1 certification, an international standard for IT Service Management. This certification demonstrates the charity’s commitment to high-quality service and professional ITSM practices.

Brian shared the positive impact on the organisation:

“There has been zero staff turnover in my department in two years. The IS budget remains flat, and we continue to improve our cost: performance ratio. We allowed the charity to operate as normal during a global pandemic – that’s priceless.”

Freshservice, implemented with Pink Elephant’s expertise, also proved invaluable during the pandemic, enabling The Brooke to efficiently manage remote working needs. For example, employees could request office items like chairs and monitors to be delivered to their homes, with quick turnaround times.

Additionally, new employees now benefit from a seamless onboarding process, with automated tasks for HR and IS ensuring that everything from locker assignment to IT setup is handled smoothly:

“We know weeks in advance when someone is arriving, and everything just seems to work like magic. Of course, it’s not magic – it’s process.”

What is ISO 20000-1?

ISO 20000-1 is an internationally recognized standard for Service Management Systems (SMS). To meet this standard, service providers must design, establish, implement, operate, monitor, review, maintain, and continually improve an SMS. Achieving ISO 20000-1 certification is a mark of reliability and high service quality, providing a competitive edge in the industry.