Combined ITSM & PPM Takes IT Organization and Service Delivery to New Level at BYU-Hawaii

Brigham Young University – Hawaii is leveraging TeamDynamix for IT service management (ITSM) and project portfolio management (PPM) throughout their campus. The college, located on the north shore of Oahu, has more than 3200 students and the IT organization consists of 30 full-time employees with 100 student employees.

“We’re your typical IT organization at a small college,” Kevin Schlag, CIO, said. “We have operations, infrastructure and then our enterprise systems. We all try to work together to get stuff done. We have a great team, and they do a lot of work with not a lot of resources.”

When BYU-Hawaii first started with TeamDynamix it was first implemented within just IT but has since expanded.

“What’s been fascinating is as we’ve gotten better (with service delivery), we’ve seen some organizations outside of IT start asking us ‘Hey how are you doing your service management? How are you responding to tickets? How are you managing projects?’ It’s been great for us,” Schlag said.

Groups within the university, like the communications department, for example, have expressed interest in learning how IT handles their ticket responses, “We also have some assets that they’ve been looking at.”

According to Schlag, human resources (HR) is another group interested in exploring TeamDynamix for incident management, “We did a project together and we were doing some ticket management, some incident tracking – they looked at that and thought it could be something they could use too.”

In terms of using TeamDynamix for ITSM and PPM overall, Schlag said it’s been “wonderful.”

“In fact, it’s been too wonderful if you ask some of my people,” he said. “I can see what’s going on in the organization without bugging anybody. It’s great to have the feed, I can just comment on something, and I don’t have to bother somebody (for status updates).”

Schlag said prior to TeamDynamix, he’d have to call people up or email them and they’d drop whatever they were doing to respond because it was the CIO asking for an update, “It’s been wonderful for me to kind of push that off and say look, here’s an issue I’m interested in as a comment on the feed, and they can respond to that as they need to.”

In addition to increased visibility and transparency, Schlag said they’ve benefited from the reporting within TeamDynamix.

“We can roll things up into portfolios now and I can get a broad understanding of what’s happening within my organization, all the way across without, again, bugging people,” he said. “I can also drill down if I need to into specific projects or even tickets.”