A lesson in IT support
Fullbrook School turns to Richmond Systems to manage IT requests
In less than a year, Fullbrook School in Surrey has brought order to a rapidly growing IT estate. Network manager Sebastian Rogers implemented SupportDesk from Richmond Systems to manage calls to the school’s IT team in January 2007. In just two months, the software justified the need for more IT staff, bringing greater organisation to the support requirements of the school, which has 120 staff and over 1670 pupils.
The Problem
In late 2006, just three people at Fullbrook School were forced to manage over 480 stations, including 120 staff using tablet PCs. Calls came to the team in a variety of ways, from email to phone calls to office visits. The team could end up answering the request three times, as only basic spreadsheets managed the process, or – especially if it came in before a holiday – not at all.
The school planned to increase its IT estate in 2007, so Rogers looked into ways to improve the support mechanism to improve his team’s IT service.
The Solution
Rogers selected SupportDesk from Richmond Systems because of its ease of use, the way it integrates with other databases and its proven track record in the education sector. SupportDesk’s ability to track calls through the tagging system is a particular advantage: a ‘ticket number’ is attached to each call so that any member of the IT team can see exactly where each request is in the system at any time.
Each IT team member has their own ‘custom view’ of the system so that they can focus on their specific calls. If they finish early, they are able to see which other calls are a priority and start on those, even if they were allocated to someone else – and avoid any replication of work as everyone is updated at the same time.
Rogers can track all the jobs, so over time he is able to analyse trends in the school’s IT needs. “If a machine keeps breaking down, we can identify it and try to fix it,” said Rogers. “With 600 stations now in place, it’s important that we can see where we’re likely to have breakdowns and put new hardware in place before there’s a problem. Staff no longer need to change their lesson plans because a monitor won’t come on or a keyboard is sticking.”
Rogers and his team are also taking advantage of the new features including integration with Microsoft Outlook so jobs assigned to team members, meetings and holidays are visible to everyone.
Similarly, integration with the school’s inventory database means Rogers can easily access any information on any piece of kit. This is most frequently used for tracking the numerous and frequent password changes that occur at the school.
SupportDesk has provided Rogers with all the information he needs to ask for additional team members to complete the work.
“All technical issues are properly recorded, so statistics are readily available to justify IT expenditure. We can now raise service levels and reduce reoccurring problems,” he said. “Now, our Governors are more willing to consider budget rises for IT as the statistics are available for all to see based on sound information – and I don’t have to spend hours away from my job gathering the information to justify the expenditure.”
Benefits
SupportDesk has brought significant improvements to Fullbrook School’s IT system, through the easy tracking of requests and the ability to anticipate what hardware needs replacing. Extra full-time and part-time team members have supported this growth. Furthermore, the team can now track customer satisfaction. Rogers explained: “The online Customer Satisfaction Survey helps evaluate the service we offer and tells us what we need to improve.”
SupportDesk allows Rogers to provide ITIL-like services, in a way suited to the education environment: “ITIL and FITs are becoming increasingly important for best practice support – and SupportDesk enables the successful adoption of these processes.”
