In ICT Services we provide support to our workforce and schools looking after a computer network that connects 188 sites including 41 traffic signals, 330 applications and approx. 5100 devices (laptops, tablets, desktops). Each week we receive around 855 calls for help and 161 requests for new work. Some years ago we enabled people to log problems and requests online, recently we have been exploring ways by which we can automate our processes and improve our service.
Work took place to consider technologies that would help us do this and the Microsoft System Centre Service Manager product was selected as it could help streamline processes, reduce delivery time to customers, and along with Cireson technology provide a new user portal for customers to contact us.
Importantly, Service Manager provides an integrated platform for automating and adapting IT service management best practices, we use Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and it provides built-in processes for incident and problem resolution, change control, and asset lifecycle management.
Approach taken to delivery
We adopted agile techniques to help deliver the work, this included twice weekly stand ups, SPRINT planning, and show and tells to keep our customers and people working in ICT informed of how the work was evolving.
A design-led approach was taken starting with understanding our user’s needs and clarifying the problems/opportunities for improvement. Story boards and videos from a user perspective were developed to help explain different processes, these were really effective in communicating what we wanted to achieve. We developed prototypes using the test system and this played a huge part in helping to ensure we understood what people needed.
System Manager was delivered with default settings applied, work has taken place to review and amend these based on our user needs. We had to up-skill members of the Service with Powershell, Java and HTML skills to do this.
One of our key priorities was to automate the new starter process as much as possible based on the areas that were causing us the most pain. We are learning as we go to build the automation’s and this is an area that we will continue to develop.
Go Live
We started by introducing a new change process so that people in ICT could familiarise themselves with the product before we released it to our customers. This was very straightforward.
Last week we went live with our new customer portal and the ICT help desk logging incidents. We expect to further reduce the call logging time for our help desk staff later in the year when new functionality is released by Cireson. Early feedback is the portal is clean, fresh looking and easier to use.
Asset management is being used to ensure the correct devices are assigned to the right user, giving us better control and management of our assets. The overall time taken to book in multiple items has reduced from a couple days down to a couple hours.
Types of benefits we are expecting
Now we are starting to release functionality we are hoping to see:
- an increase in the number of calls and requests logged online rather than people phoning the helpdesk
- quicker provisioning of network accounts for new people joining the organisation
- a better understanding of our ICT estate: the hardware and software each person is using which helps to reduce call investigation/handling time
- quicker response to requests for small items of kit such as new mice/keyboards which can be ordered and collected on the same day
- significant reduction in asset management time – receiving, booking in and storing hardware
What Next
We wanted to make sure we got something usable out that we could start to get benefit from, go live has triggered new ideas and suggested changes which will form part of future iterations to continuously improve the service.
There is still a lot to do to move from our older systems to maximise the opportunities that System Centre provides us with. We will be looking to deliver a software deployment solution that will allow the user to request and receive third party software a lot quicker and easier than the current process, ensuring we are licensed correctly and only paying for what we are using.
Our next area to develop is Dashboards to allow a better understanding of service performance, this will enable us to spot areas of concern and use the data to prioritise our ongoing improvement work.
Lynn Reynolds – ICT Project Manager
