Government Technology

Surrey Heath Borough Council is made up of 300 staff and based in Camberley, Surrey. The IT support department consists of three technicians who have a responsibility for maintaining all hardware, ensuring that it operates efficiently and that any problems are resolved within a short time-frame.
    
The success of the department relies on an efficient system of logging IT problems, or calls, keeping an inventory of all hardware and being able to keep both staff and senior management satisfied by meeting service level agreements. The efficiency of this system has a direct effect on the department as a whole.

The challenge
Previously the IT support department used a system, which was about eight years old, however, the IT technicians began to find this system inefficient and inflexible and decided to find a new solution. Andrew Palmer, IT helpdesk supervisor at Surrey Heath Council, comments: “Our old system didn’t give us much information on each call as there wasn’t a reporting functionality. The hardware inventory capabilities were limited and there was no flexibility within the system. I decided to begin looking around for a new system and attended the service desk and IT support show at Earls Court to see what the other options were.
    
“Sitehelpdesk.com really stood out to me mainly for its simplicity and the cost was so reasonable when compared to other systems. As a small team, we didn’t want a complex system with lots of complicated functions that we would never get to use. We liked the fact that we could customise the system to suit our requirements, and also add more complex functions only if we needed them. As soon as we had the budget confirmed in May 2009, we purchased 10 licences for Sitehelpdesk-IT for our IT department.”

Working more efficiently
Surrey Heath Borough Council needed the system to help its team of IT technicians make updates on the status of each call so that if a member of staff is off sick it is easy for another colleague to pick the job up in their absence. The solution also allows the department to carry out its quarterly audits on equipment with ease.
    
Andrew Palmer continues: “Previously a hardware audit would have taken us over a month to do and a lot of work would have been involved in finding out the location and member of staff that is responsible for that piece of equipment. With Sitehelpdesk-IT we can keep on top of this as we go along by assigning a piece of equipment to a specific user as soon as it is purchased. The drop down menus on Sitehelpdesk-IT allow us to assign it to locations and identify whether a piece of equipment is damaged and diagnose the problem. As a result, the audit now takes a maximum of three weeks, making our lives significantly easier. This also helps us keep up to date with our internal replacement programme where equipment is updated every four years.”

Benefits
Since implementation, the department has seen an improvement in the time it takes to respond to a problem once it has been reported. Staff are now able to log their own calls into the system instead of the previous method of leaving phone messages, e-mailing or reporting the problem in person. Sitehelpdesk-IT will then keep the user updated on the progress via automated e-mails, leaving support staff to concentrate on resolving the IT issue rather than on admin tasks.
    
The department also purchased SLAmonitor, an add-on tool that measures service level agreements. The department’s policy for resolving an IT issue states that the issue should be responded to within one hour and completed in four hours. SLAmonitor will send an e-mail to the helpdesk manager just before any call goes over the one hour response agreement so that it can be looked into. The SLAmonitor tool also allows senior management and council staff to monitor how effectively this policy is being adhered to, something that was previously difficult to judge.
    
Another way of measuring how the IT support department is performing is by surveying 20 per cent of the calls that come in on a monthly basis to find out how timely the issue was resolved and how satisfied council staff are overall. Sitehelpdesk-IT even allows the department to carry out these surveys more efficiently as the previous method was paper based and it depended on staff returning the completed survey’s to the department. With Sitehelpdesk-IT, the surveys can be completed electronically, vastly improving the rate of return. Andrew Palmer states that they receive between five to ten extra forms a month since the feature has been made electronic.
    
“We have been very impressed with the functionality of Sitehelpdesk-IT. Not only has it has given us increased flexibility in the way we manage our workload and respond to calls, it has also delivered us many other unexpected benefits. As well as all the standard features of Sitehelpdesk-IT such as call logging and hardware inventory, we have also added the monthly survey function and changed some of the fields to adapt to our business needs.”
    
Due to the success of implementing Sitehelpdesk.com into the IT support department, Surrey Heath Borough Council has since purchased a further five licenses for its IT applications and system teams which respond to technical issues to do with the council’s servers, network infrastructure and complex application support. An additional five licences have also been purchased for the facilities management team which require it to log calls to do with facilities issues or stationary orders.

For more information
Call 0207 419 5174 or e-mail This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it