After a layoff with a .com I took a position with a large University as part of their IT department. I thought this was the ideal position if I was ever going to learn more about the IT industry (get my master’s degree for free). The first thing I learned is that the help desk is a lot more than answering a phone and surfing the web. For starters, our department supported every classroom on campus, (over 100) and each one had a computer, projector, VCR or any other form of media you can think of. This also included overhead projectors and televisions, (yes the ones on rolling carts). Not only did we support the classrooms with installed media, but also those where staff and faculty brought in their own equipment. As a fellow IT support professional, you know how we expect to only support our own, company approved technology equipment, but most of the time we’re forced to support things we have never seen before (Can you help me with my iPod? My SmartPhone is acting up; can you take a look?). This happened on a daily basis. And since faculty are equivalent to worshippable-entities, we (as in the lowly IT folks) would take complete blame for the fact that their daughter’s laptop did not work in the classroom—never mind the fact they forgot to bring the power cord and there was a wet, sticky substance covering the entire keyboard. “Yes, this is my fault and it will not happen again Sir Faculty Member.”
The rolling boob tubes were a whole other story. You would think these were rolling pots of gold. These televisions would disappear even after we chained them to blackboards, held them down with concrete boulders and attached security officers to them. This is not a small campus, but you would find television #10 in a building 2 miles from its origin. Now maybe someone used a chain saw to cut the chain, brought in a powerlifter to remove the boulder and tasered the security officer, but to roll the 40 pound cart and television 2 miles in 4 feet of snow… well, I’ll just say that nothing surprises me anymore.
In order to track how many times this same faculty member berated me in front of the entire student body and the televisions I chased through snow drifts, I developed a handy excel spreadsheet and a whiteboard. The spreadsheet collected the classroom information, caller’s name and the problem they were having. This may have been one of the best developments in our department in the last decade. I could tell my boss how many times the same faculty member contacted us, the classrooms with the most problems and what the problems were, but best of all I could defend the need for named voodoo dolls in my desk drawer (you know who you are Professor Owen). The whiteboard had little colorful boxes representing classrooms and a Velcro patch representing all the televisions. When we moved a television to a different classroom, we moved the Velcro on the whiteboard. I know, genius and foolproof! No one would ever play a joke and pull all Velcro televisions off the board or erase the classrooms! Now that I think about it, the tearing noise of Velcro helps prevent pick pocketing, maybe we should have used it to secure the televisions.
Not long after I got stuck in an elevator because a rolling television cart’s power cord was in the door when it closed, I left the University. It had nothing to do with the broken television, mangled cart, and disrupted classes due to a really loud bang when the television slammed into the elevator door and I screamed, or the very expensive cost of fixing an elevator in a romanesque building built in the 1800’s. Rather, I had completed my master’s degree and decided to move on to a different state. I swear it had nothing to do with the injury left on the oldest erected building on campus.
I look back on this job and could just kick myself for not pushing harder for a helpdesk tool. Numara Track-It! would have saved us headaches and oh, all that money we spent on Velcro! I can see it now…we could have configured Numara Track-It! to track all of the most important information about the classrooms, users, problems, (not to mention the requests for televisions) etc.. We would have known that tickets were actually “closed” and what the solution was; who worked on the ticket and even self-service functionality so we weren’t spending our time on the SAME issues. The built in reports would have helped demonstrate why the students decided that their professors were not intelligent enough to teach them anything. More importantly, the reports would have proven the importance of having a dedicated IT department on campus and would have supported the request for more staff and more technology resources because the bottom line is: IT really does contribute to the learning experience of students.
Please share your experiences with implementing Numara Track-It! What did you start with? What pain points were you trying to address? How did Numara Track-It! help you and your organization?
