Late Last Fall we began having serious conversations about changing the way we have been delivering desktop support services to the administrative staff. We looked at where we can bring greater efficiencies and offer a more consistent support. Based on this analysis and on conversations with various administrative offices, we decided to reorganize the administrative desktop support. This is a fairly significant change and we plan to introduce these changes slowly.
Phase I (effective March 24,2008):
- All administrative desktop support will be handled by the ITS Helpdesk.
- John Hammond is the new Helpdesk Manager and he will report to the Director of User and Technical Support Services. The search for this position will begin soon. Until the position is filled, John will report to G. Ravishanker, Associate VP for ITS.
- Ben Jackson and Harriett Epstein are the other two staff members of this unit.
- John will also oversee the student helpdesk.
- Whenever possible, please send your requests to the consolidated support queue – supportadmin@wesleyan.edu. Your request will be assigned a ticket ID and will be prioritized and attended to in a timely manner.
- If this cannot be done, please call Ext 4777 (instead of calling one of the desktop support staff directly) for all requests during the regular business hours.
- It is our expectation that one of the staff members will answer the call and attend to the request.
- During the transition period, if the Helpdesk staff cannot pick up the call, it will roll over to ITS operations before going to the voicemail.
- Depending on the nature of the call, the staff members will either answer question(s) or add it to the queue and assign it to the staff member who is most familiar with your department (for example, Ben will be assigned to UR whenever possible).
- The tickets that require a staff member to visit a department will be organized so that many pending tickets in that vicinity can be resolved in one single visit.
Phase II
In order to bring a lot more efficiency to the Helpdesk model, we plan to acquire a more robust and functional helpdesk software, remote control software (which will allow the helpdesk to take control of your screen remotely) and inventory control system (which will help us identify the type of computer each of you have so the support can be tailored accordingly). Currently, these systems are not integrated and it causes many problems. We expect to identify and implement a new helpdesk system by this summer. In addition, with the help of the server administrators, we will look at implementing some of the desktop optimization tools that Microsoft has developed that will help us manage the helpdesk more efficiently.
We also have a very highly talented pool of students in the student helpdesk who will be trained by our professional staff during this phase to help us support the administrative staff.
Sometime during the Fall semester, we hope to have many of these in place. As a user the changes that you will see during this phase are:
- Depending on the nature of the problem, the professional helpdesk staff may hand the ticket or the phone call over to the student helpdesk.
- If your call or ticket can be handled through remote desktop tool, with your consent, a professional staff will take control of your computer remotely and try to resolve the issue.
- Most of the other enhancements during this phase will be to bring efficiencies to the helpdesk. For example, the software tools we plan to implement will help us analyze the response times, resolution times, plan hardware replacement, and administer software upgrades more efficiently.
Phase III
We believe that it is time to revisit the current desktop/laptop replacement policy because of changes that have taken place in various areas of technology. Soon, we will be forming a working group to develop a new plan. Stay Tuned…