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April 22, 2021

6 minutes read

What to Do When IT Ticket Volume Is Out of Control: Lessons from Florida Southwestern State College

By

Andrew Graf

Like many IT departments, when the pandemic hit in early 2020 the IT department at Florida Southwester State College was flooded with requests from students, faculty and staff. From students needing technology to complete virtual learning, to faculty and staff having issues with Zoom – the IT staff was overwhelmed with requests but set up for success with TeamDynamix IT Service Management (ITSM).

Answering the Call with an ITSM Software Self-Service Portal

There was little time for the college to prepare for the shift to remote learning, but the IT team was able to quickly assess the tickets coming in and appropriately route them.

“We posted a number of FAQs to our TeamDynamix client portal for remote support,” Jason Dudley, associate vice president for information technology said. “We started directing faculty, staff, and students to the client portal to search for answers to their questions. Self-service reduced inbound IT service requests by at least 25 percent.”

Even so, the college’s IT staff fielded twice as many requests in March 2020 as they normally handle.

“Our tickets doubled, and yet we were able to manage them all without any issues,” Dudley said proudly. While he attributes much of this success to the professionalism of his IT staff, having a high-quality IT service management platform (ITSM) also played a critical role, “There’s no way we would have been able to do that with any other system I’ve used before.”

“Our tickets doubled, and yet we were able to manage them all without any issues.”

Communication, Transparency Key to ITSM Success

Florida Southwestern State use a single platform approach to manage both their IT services and their projects. By having ITSM and Project Portfolio Management (PPM) on one platform Dudley and his staff have full visibility into all project work as well as tickets, incidents and problems. All work, and resource allocation across the work, is in one place, “IT projects no longer disappear into a ‘black hole,’ we have full transparency,” he said.

College personnel can submit project requests through the TeamDynamix client portal. Dudley and his staff have created a scoring system within the platform that helps college leaders understand how mission-critical a project is. This gives them a formal project intake framework that can be leveraged in high-level stakeholder discussions.

“I meet with the other vice presidents on-campus quarterly,” he says. “I provide them with the list of projects that have been submitted through TeamDynamix, along with a scorecard for these projects and we use this scorecard as one of the driving factors in making decisions as a team about which projects we should move forward on and in what order of priority.”

Since implementing TeamDynamix, “we’ve become much more efficient at completing projects,” Dudley notes. “Our project completion time has stayed consistent; however, we’re now able to complete twice as many projects in the same time frame. In our most recent analysis, we showed a 60-percent increase in the number of projects we completed over a six-month period.”

To read more about Florida Southwestern State College’s successes check out their customer spotlight: Reaching New Heights with IT Service Management (ITSM) Software.

Andrew Graf

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