How 24 Hour Fitness saved 37% of their ITSM budget and empowered teams to manage their own service requests with Atlassian

Challenge: To exceed 24 Hour Fitness member expectations and keep them engaged on their fitness journey, 24 Hour Fitness needs to keep its sales and member portals running smoothly. Moving away from siloed service management tools and processes was a critical part of that strategy, as agility prefers individuals and interactions over rigid and siloed tools and processes.

Solution: 24 Hour Fitness switched from BMC Remedy to Atlassian Jira Service Management, creating a collaborative, decentralized service management system that integrated with their existing use of Jira and Confluence for IT.

Impact: By switching to Jira Service Management, 24 Hour Fitness saved 37% of its IT budget for Service Management solutions, and improved the employee and customer experience with fully visible, cross-functional service flows 17 internal teams, from Digital and Technology to HR.

Strong, flexible service management for a fitness champion

Time and money often prevent people from reaching their fitness goals, 24 Hour Fitness has an answer for both. The chain operates over 240 affordable gyms across the US, with accessible late-night hours. And to join, prospective and current members will find themselves interacting with 24 Hour Fitness software.

Members, customers, guests, and 24 Hour Fitness team members rely on 24 Hour Fitness’s software — and at the company’s enterprise scale, building and maintaining it is no small task. “We aren’t just a fitness company. You could say inside of 24 Hour Fitness is a very small, hyper efficient software company,” says James Gambrill, Sr. Manager in Engineering. An effective service management tool that can help connect the end user experience to the service team and then to the delivery team and flag customer problems along the way, is crucial so that 24 Hour Fitness can make sure its software meets teams members' needs and makes fitness an attainable goal for our members.

However, it’s not just IT teams who need to manage changes and requests — nearly all teams across 24 Hour Fitness require some form of service management. For example, the HR department receives employee requests to process and the data team receives requests for analytics reports. Before 24 Hour Fitness added Jira Service Management to their Atlassian System of Work, team members largely used traditional email processes which are known to impede efficiency, work visibility, and cross-team collaboration.

Time to retire: the legacy ITSM tool siloing teamwork

Before adopting Jira Service Management, 24 Hour Fitness used BMC Remedy for service management. Change Requests were duplicative and tedious to complete, and all customer requests were manually entered and triaged by the Service Desk, who would relay non-technology team requests out of Remedy to the relevant team using their preferred tools — again email being the norm.

This system had multiple issues that prevented 24 Hour Fitness from operating as smoothly and efficiently as possible.

• Change management: It was so time-consuming to get even simple changes submitted and approved that meant not all changes were tracked — causing confusion later if issues arose.

• Low user adoption: Remedy’s interface was un-intuitive and high-friction, leading to user resistance — even for straightforward processes like simple work tracking.

• Limited integration capabilities: Remedy didn’t connect to tools other teams relied on — notably Jira and Confluence, which application development teams has used for deployment and work tracking since 2015.

“Running multiple systems with overlapping functionality is expensive and inefficient,” says James. “It creates siloed processes and holds back cross-team communication.” For 24 Hour Fitness team members, the result was customer frustration, slow issue resolution in day-to-day work, and sometimes accepting broken as the status quo — which affects 24 Hour Fitness members and guests, too. For example, if members find the portal inconvenient or the mobile app not engaging, they may stop showing up or cancel their membership entirely.

The goal: teams juggling service management fluidly

Rick and James had a vision for a new era of service management at 24 Hour Fitness. They wanted each team to be confident handling their own service requests, and have full visibility into how their work affected each other. According to James, “When teams are working in the same system for everything from documenting incidents to planning delivery, you see amazing teamwork alignment.”

As they discussed what 24 Hour Fitness needed from a service management system, they identified two priorities: empowering teams through service ownership and making work visible.

• Service ownership called for a decentralized system through which every team could manage their own requests.

• Visible work required a tool that would unify workflows across development, service management, human resources and more.

To realize both these goals, they’d need higher user adoption — which meant choosing a service management tool employees actually wanted to use. “The more people in our new system, the more collaboration and teamwork,” says Rick. “We want people working together to achieve a common goal, not struggling to communicate across silos.”

A solution partner ready to fuel 24 Hour Fitness’s zero-budget transformation

While Rick and James had the skills to build the new system, they needed an implementation partner to advise on the design. “We couldn’t do it alone,” recalls James. “Our transformation had almost zero budget, and we were the entire team,” recalls James. They found the partner they needed in FMX Solutions — or as James calls them, “the accelerant to our fire”

“FMX was on board with our unusual statement of work. They acted as a consultant, helping us come up with a solid, functional design to build ourselves.” Xavier Bougot, FMX co-founder, agrees. “We acted more in advisory than hands-on execution role,” he says. “This wasn’t a supplier-customer relationship, it was a true partnership between two organizations.”

Jira, Confluence, and Jira Service Management: the cross-functional collaboration dream team

Because their teams had long relied on Jira and Confluence, Jira Service Management was the obvious choice for 24 Hour Fitness’s service transformation. Because the three tools integrate seamlessly, 24 Hour Fitness would be able to handle incidents, change requests, and user stories in a single platform. For example, the service manager would now be able to show the development team if a deployment had created 50 support tickets for his team.

As part of their new service management, 24 Hour Fitness also launched Jira Service Management Assets as their CMDB (Configuration Management Database). Asset records everyone and everything within the company, from employee data to hardware to buildings. Assets supercharge service flows by providing visibility not just into tasks but also into the people and the items they concern.

Crucially, Jira Service Management is flexible enough to manage service requests beyond 24 Hour Fitness’s core IT use case, and business teams like Human Resources have also come on board. “For 24 Hour Fitness, Jira Service Management is no longer an IT solution — it’s an enterprise service management tool,” says James. “We went from IT being the control tower, to decentralized administration where teams own their own service delivery.”

From onboarding to payroll, HR own workflows in Jira Service Management

24 Hour Fitness’s Human Resources function now uses a self-administered Jira Service Management project to manage their own requests and changes. The project is customized to HR’s unique needs. For example, HR teams can’t see each others' tickets as they contain personal information and compensation data. “This would have been hard to build in Remedy, but Jira Service Management made it quick and easy,” says Rick.

24 Hour Fitness’s Jira Service Management Assets-based CMDB is integral to nearly all HR workflows. For example, an onboarding flow won’t just show the employee’s profile within the Assets human tracking database — it also shows devices they’ve requested, clubs they work at, and security clearance to be granted. It is also the basis of 24 Hour Fitness JSM customer management solution where scripting and automation manage both HR and IT JSM customer adds/remove automatically.

“This is all closed-loop,” says Rick. “It’s done by HR, within Jira Service Management, driven by Assets.”

HR Manager Rose Nguyen adds, “Since implementing Jira as our ticketing system, we’ve significantly improved the way we manage HR requests. The visibility, accountability, customizability, and automation it provides has streamlined our workflows and reduced response times — allowing us to better serve our internal teams and focus more on strategic initiatives.”

Improving members' experience by passing the baton seamlessly from tech to business

Since switching to Jira Service Management, transparent cross-functional workflows are becoming an integral part of 24 Hour Fitness’s operations, improving both the employee and customer experience.

For example, linking incidents tickets to change requests makes it easier for dev teams to see how their deployments affect the club and member experience. “If people can see that a change they deployed caused 75 help center tickets within minutes, they’ll start thinking about how to run safer deployments and roll back problematic ones quickly,” says James.

The new system has also given employees in the field a clear place to share issues and stay in the loop as they’re resolved. “Say you’re a club manager, and you keep having problems when entering a zip code — that’s frustrating because it interrupts a sales conversation,” says James. “Now, there’s one support center team you’ll raise a request to. They escalate it to development, and that ticket is visible all the way through the process, because everyone’s in the same ecosystem.”

20% more changes tracked, creating visibility downstream

Change management has also greatly improved since the transformation. In their first year on Jira Service Management, 24 Hour Fitness saw a 20% increase in changes tracked compared to the prior year on Remedy. Now, teams have 100% traceability into when changes were made and why. “When something breaks, we’re more likely to be able to find what caused it in that time window,” says Rick. That allows them to take action to prevent it next time, so the team member and member experience stays as frictionless as possible.

37% of IT service management budget saved yearly, with plans to streamline further with Atlassian AI

Finally, Jira Service Management helped Rick and James achieve their ambitious zero-budget goal. The cost of their years on Jira Service Management, plus the implementation partnership with FMX, was still less than the cost of one year with Remedy. By adopting Jira Service Management, 24 Hour Fitness saved 37% of their IT service management budget — savings that will grow the longer they stay on the system.

In the near future, Rick and James are excited to bring even more teams on Jira Service Management, and experiment with Atlassian Rovo and Virtual Service Agent. “I’m all-in on Rovo right now,” says James. “As a product owner, you can go from complex Jira releases, to Rovo-generated summaries in Jira Service Management change approvals within minutes. Your team has already made the work visible, and Rovo curates it into an approvable change request.”

But already, 24 Hour Fitness has embraced a more connected a transparent way of working. “Atlassian has contributed to our goal of a healthier, happier, more collaborative work environment,” says James. “We’re supporting each other, because no one can do it alone.”