Going beyond IT with ESM for Facilities, Student Services and other groups.
Feedback loops and improved productivity drive KB improvements.
By stepping into the ITIL framework the team realized productivity gains.
Industry: Higher Education
End-users: 4,000
Previous System: Legacy
Keeping students and faculty happy is critical in today’s highly competitive campus environment, and providing an exceptional student and faculty experience is essential to meeting this goal. A key component to this strategy is to deploy a single enterprise service management (ESM) for Facilities, HR, IT, Student Services, and more.
Drake University, a mid-size private university in Des Moines, Iowa, understands this as well as anyone. “We’re a service organization,” says Chief Information Technology Officer Chris Gill, referring to the university’s Information Technology Services (ITS) division. “We can’t deliver on the promise of 21st-century learning environments without strong IT service. Making sure technology is working properly is fundamental to providing a high-quality student experience.”
How does an organization ensure top-notch service? By measuring how well it’s meeting the needs of stakeholders — and continuous improvement. Drake’s ITS unit does this with the help of TeamDynamix, a comprehensive IT service, project, and resource management platform. “One of our key objectives is to build a culture of service excellence,” Gill says, “and TeamDynamix is at the heart of this effort.”
When Gill arrived at Drake five years ago, the university had a new president who was looking to instill a culture of continuous improvement. That aligned well with Gill’s vision for ITS.
Gill wanted to bring a more mature approach to IT service management by adopting best practices from the ITIL service framework. To do this, the university needed a new, more sophisticated platform for managing ITS functions.
The new platform had to empower stakeholders to resolve their own technology issues, if possible, by giving ITS staff an easy way to create a knowledge base of articles and a self-service catalog. It had to allow end-users and technicians alike to initiate service tickets and manage workflows from a smartphone or other mobile device. It had to bring transparency to ITS operations by enabling users to see the full history of service requests. And, it had to track key metrics that ITS would use to measure the quality of its service in order to improve.
After reviewing many systems, it was clear that TeamDynamix was the best solution for the university’s needs.
“The ITIL framework can get overwhelming if you’re not careful,” Gill says. “TeamDynamix was a nice balance for an institution our size. It’s very powerful, but it doesn’t require a lot of overhead to maintain. We’re very happy with it.”
The team can easily identify areas for process improvement with KPI tracking.
With no-code ITSM/ESM, expansion is easy. Quickly create custom forms and workflows.
TeamDynamix has worked so well for ITS that other divisions at Drake University have begun using the platform to improve service as well, making it a true enterprise service solution.
“Our facilities department was using an archaic system to track and manage facilities projects and service requests,” Hilscher says. “When we told them about the capabilities we have within TeamDynamix and how it could help them as well, they decided to jump in right away.”
The facilities department has its own tenancy within TeamDynamix, but ITS oversees its administration and manages the rights of users. Other university departments — including Key Services, Student Card Services, and Drake Online — are looking at setting up similar arrangements.
By empowering people to help themselves, streamlining and automating key workflows, and providing transparency and insight into each step of the service fulfillment process, TeamDynamix is helping Drake University serve its stakeholders more effectively, resulting in greater satisfaction.
“Ultimately, what matters to me is customer satisfaction,” Gill concludes. “Our satisfaction rating as measured in student and faculty surveys is where we want it to be, which is at least a 4 on a 5-point Likert scale. We have been able to improve that score even with increasingly aging technology. That’s how we measure whether we’re fulfilling our mission as a department — and TeamDynamix has been instrumental in that.”
With everything running through a single platform, managers and executives can quickly gain valuable insights for improvements.
