By leveraging automation, the city improved employee onboarding.
By deploying a portal with automation, ticket volume is down.
One platform can be used for IT, HR, and Facilities for a unified experience.
Industry: Public Sector
End-users: 100K +
Previous System: Heat
City governments must serve their citizens effectively, often with limited staff. The TeamDynamix enterprise service management (ESM) platform plays a critical role in helping multiple branches of the City of Avondale, Arizona, government work better together. With a more efficient organization, the city can respond to citizens’ needs faster and more effectively. By leveraging a single portal with automated request routing and workflows, the team can be more responsive and transparent with citizens.
The government for the City of Avondale consists of 14 departments serving nearly 100,000 residents. Its use of TeamDynamix (TDX) began within the IT department, which was looking for a better way to support employees’ use of technology through ITSM.
“Before, people would have to call or email our help desk with their service requests,” says CIO Jeff Scheetz. “However, now with the portal, IT has been able to create workflows and automations, rather than managing the many email and ticket requests. The workflow ensures that the requests are handled efficiently and provides additional reporting capabilities. Before, it was hard to prioritize tasks without a full view of what was going on.”
In just a little over a year, Scheetz and his staff transformed the delivery of IT service for the city using the TeamDynamix platform.
Now, government employees can submit their IT service requests through a self-service portal, and they can find answers to common questions and problems within a growing knowledge base. When service requests are submitted, they are routed automatically to the appropriate team member for a response, based on the nature of the issue.
Team members are automatically notified when tasks that affect them are completed or require their involvement—and comprehensive dashboards give IT leaders full visibility into the status of all service requests.
“We have much better communication now, and tickets are getting handled much faster,” Scheetz observes. “The TeamDynamix platform saves everyone a lot of time and helps us make sure that nothing gets lost in the shuffle.”
When other city departments saw how the platform helped improve the delivery of IT service, they realized they could streamline their own processes using TeamDynamix.
The Human Resources department, Facilities and Finance were the first to onboard.
Onboarding new employees was a multi-step process with a lot of paper shuffling – now it is all automated.
TeamDynamix is helping to improve interdepartmental collaboration. For example, onboarding new employees is a multistep process that used to be quite cumbersome. Once new hires have completed all of the paperwork required by HR, they also need network privileges from IT. They have to be added to the payroll system, and they need access to the building from Facilities.
This process used to involve a lot of paper shuffling, and it could take a while to complete. Now, the entire workflow can be initiated with a single service request that is routed to the various departments automatically.
Having an automated system that keeps everyone on the same page has made working remotely much easier for city employees during the pandemic. “If someone needs to work from home, we can easily accommodate that now,” Scheetz says.
“We can see trends and patterns that help us deploy our limited resources in a more intelligent manner. TeamDynamix makes a huge difference.”
TeamDynamix has not only helped streamline workflows and improve communication among city employees; it also provides key insights that help leaders manage their departments more effectively. “We can see trends and patterns that help us deploy our limited resources in a more intelligent manner,” Scheetz explains.
Leaders can see how much time various tasks are taking, so they can plan better for the future—such as by justifying additional hires or reassigning staff to other projects. Leaders can also see which service categories are getting the most requests, which helps with resource allocation as well as troubleshooting. If there are a lot of support tickets related to a certain piece of software, this might indicate that staff need more training on how to use it, or it might be time to look for a system that’s easier to use. Having this insight allows IT and other departments to be more proactive in solving problems.
Avondale’s IT department also uses TeamDynamix for tracking and managing IT assets. Before, this information was scattered across multiple systems. Now, Scheetz and his team can see everything in one place, which makes it easier for them to understand infrastructure needs.
Scheetz’s department is creating a project management office (PMO), and TeamDynamix will facilitate the management of IT projects as well. Aided by the platform, the PMO will implement a formal intake process for evaluating projects, prioritizing them, and allocating resources appropriately. The platform can also be used to load balance work across both tickets and projects, giving managers a single view.
TeamDynamix has enabled employees to streamline city operations and deliver better service to Avondale residents. The system’s versatility has added a tremendous amount of value to the city government. “Everybody has a limited staff,” Scheetz says of municipal organizations. “Having a system like TeamDynamix makes a huge difference.”
