Friday, October 12, 2012

Increasing Service Levels...now!!

Increasing Service Levels....your #1 highlighted point on the ITS Satisfaction Survey.

I found your write in comments informative, valuable, honest. They provide direction for us as we restructure.

Here is the layout of a few things that we have going in ITS to Increase Service Levels:
  • Separation of Student Help Desk from Faculty/Staff Service Desk
    • The Student Help Desk will remain where it is located and be staffed by students
    • The Faculty/Staff Service Desk will have two components:
      • A front office team led by Linda Ludwig. The front office team will be comprised of individuals with excellent communications skills, excellent diagnostic skills, and a sense of urgency. The front office team will receive all tickets (a request for help, by you, to solve a technology problem) and calls...whether by Kbox, phone call, drop by, or carrier pigeon. The front office team will triage and get tickets to the right person. Tickets will be owned by a human being. Parameters will be set by the front office team regarding ticket severity. Severity levels will govern our resolution time, communications process, and start a timer for ticket escalation within the ITS management structure. Our objective in the Front Office team is to resolve 70% of our tickets on first touch. They will largely handle what we call Level 1 (L1) issues...issues of a less technical nature.
      • A back office team led by Alex Kaltsas. The back office team is the more technical component of the Faculty/Staff Service Desk. The back office team is our L2/L3 team. They will be responsible for account provisioning, hardware/software provisioning (ordering), license management, lab maintenance, and creating and deploying desktop images. The back office team will office in close proximity to the front office team in the South Lounge.
  • New Service Desk Location, the South Lounge. The South Lounge will be the location of our Service Desk area. It will provide a work space that will allow for the consolidation of our service personnel who currently are scattered in The Forum. Consolidation will allow us to provide a highly collaborative approach to problem solving...resulting in better service to you. The layout will foster teamwork and provide a proximity to the Student Help Desk for the escalation of their issues. We plan an open house in early November after we move in to this space.
  • A new Service Desk Manager has been hired. John Hammond will be joining us later this month from the University of Iowa. John will report to me (Director of ITS) and have oversight over the Student Help Desk and the Faculty/Staff Service Desk. Student workers will report to John.
  • Kbox will be our main method for logging and tracking tickets. We need to log all  tickets...track them to completion, determine who's queue is filling up, and determine service trends. Weekly, we will be creating reports...ticket aging...queues by ITS staff member...top ticket types...etc. Weekly, we will do root cause analysis; then, for our top five occurring incidents each week, we will create permanent fixes. Takes us out of the "whack-a-mole" business.  
  • Karen and Alex have been going through old tickets for the past 2 weeks. The oldest ticket we have found that I am aware of is from February. Fortunately, February of this year. If that was yours, know that you hold the winning ticket...so far. What an honor...!!! So, we are following up on old tickets and resolving them! We will likely be doing a lot of apologizing over the next few weeks. Good news is we are making progress...good progress. I believe that all printer issues are resolved on campus.
  • We are going to prioritize a focus on serving people with disabilities...increasing service levels for those with access constraints. We have 25-40 students on campus with disabilities that need technology enablement. As I attended the Disabilities Committee meeting last week, I learned how much I personally need to mature my thinking about individuals with disabilities. My desire is that ITS be a leader in assisting our fellow students and workers who carry the daily disadvantage of access. I desire for us to be a department that cares for and responds to all members of our community.
The backdrop of these changes is the ITS team. They are a great hearted group that care deeply, deeply, about service to you. They are our strength. What we need is process. That is what we are creating. Process will bring us an organized way of doing things that will bring us lift.

I get a number of questions and comments concerning how to connect with us. I hear: "How do I use your team? I don't know who to call." Here is my answer...continue, for the moment, doing what you have always done. Call X-4901, or X-4400...or, put in a Kbox ticket. We will respond. Longer term...over the weeks...we will roll these changes out to you in an organized fashion. Our intent is to be largely operational in the new structure in early November.

We'll keep you posted on progress. Thanks for stopping by...


Ray

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