Q2 Fiscal Year 2009 (Oct 2008 - Dec 2008)

-->Accomplishments:

• Accounts: Annual account deactivations (technically complete 2nd week of January but all work happens in Q2)
• Business Help: Open Enrollment planning and support.  Smoothest OE ever from a Help Desk support perspective. Worked with staff in HR Payroll and VPF to improve and make more consistent escalations and communications around customer support.
• Tools: Hermes IT community knowledge base released.  All Help Desk content migrated over as well. Completed project with Sloan Management Review to begin using RT for their customer communications and subscription management
• Athena/Academic:  Athena 10 testing, development, and support planning (jdreed, alexp from CSS heavily involved).  FS/ILG off-campus network installations and upgraded (peloquin, abonvie).   GIS planning group sponsors faculty advisory board luncheon (othomas is IS&T rep but aside from that all Libraries folks).  Participated/consulted on Dewey Library 2nd floor renovation and technology spaces (space opened January 2009, othomas)
• Service Center:  Service center upgrades and improvements include standardizing staffing schedule for software repair, adding clear status information to RT tickets to improve management of customer expectations, organizing software work stations and shared resources, and exploring options for improved security in Service Center room. Dell printer hardware service level improvements (several meetings with deep Dell printer engineers, resources for Russell and service center)
• Telephone and network:  Kicked off VoIP softphone release project (still ongoing). 802.11n / Cisco wireless network testing (othomas, peloquin heavily involved)
• Staffing and Resource Management: Developed Help Desk Resource model for a shared understanding of how resources are currently being spent. Sponsored 3 Sloan freshmen exploring operational efficiencies for Prof. Graves' freshmen seminar. Transitioned a long term temp into a regular hardware technician staff position. Managed long term family medical leave of key team leader by adjusting some roles and responsibilities and hiring and training a qualified temp to cover Call Center hours. Began dialogs to determine overlaps and collaboration possibilities between current HD and other IS&T teams starting

Challenges:

• Managing lots of change, and lots of anxiety about more future change.
• Determining pace and appropriateness of scaling up help services to be more expansive and inclusive.
• Being hampered by a lack of robust and reliable tools for managing tickets, facilitating data mining, managing billing and financial oversight.

Goals:

• Improve our abilities to mine and share useful data and metrics from RT, eOn.  Barbara Johnson taking the lead.
• Encourage active use of Hermes; Aim to move more and more content from private Help Desk only space to public space for self-service.
• Improve our processes for monitoring and responding to the more challenging network issues that cross between support and OIS.  Establish clear Help Desk/OIS liaison to assist in gathering, documenting and updating information we can use to manage customer issues.
• Draft proposals for Telephone Help / Computing Help collaboration, and for Service Center redefinition and consolidation.
• Begin to tackle challenge of identifying basic unit costs for services provided by the Help Desk