Lexington County Schools - Taking Service Management Beyond the Help Desk in Education

Customer Overview

Lexington County School District One is among the fastest-growing school districts in South Carolina, ranking sixth in total enrollment with more than 26,800 students from Pre-Kindergarten to Grade 12 and more than 4,500 staff in 30 schools. The school district is one of Lexington County’s major employers.

Challenges

The school district was looking for a ticketing system that would be able to support their growing infrastructure needs. They needed to replace a legacy homegrown help desk system that was no longer supportable with a robust system with a simple and easy-to-use system. It needed to be intuitive and scalable to support other department needs within the school system.

Solutions

The school district replaced their legacy system with BOSSDesk and used the system both to support standard IT service requests as well as requests in other departments such as food services and maintenance that were previously not handled by IT. BOSSDesk service catalog supports their various service categories and handles over 30,000 service requests. The solution was deployed very quickly and has been regarded as a great success.

Results

Ben Sellers, Senior Systems Analyst at Lexington County School District One, was the person who spearheaded the implementation and had some very useful tips on how to win user adoption and also get the buy-in from other departments.

Here are some of his suggestions:

Keep it Simple, especially on the “front end” if you want users to adopt the system.
Spend time on routing rule configuration. Understand where your tickets are being directed to, so that you don’t end up with a large number of unassigned tickets.
Other groups outside IT may not use the system the way as IT. Adapt the system to address their needs and issues.
Spend time on the knowledge base. The more self-service you can provide agents and end users, the better.
Do the legwork on the service catalog setup.
Use the watcher feature on important requests. It allows managers to stay in the loop on important ticket requests.
Encourage use. At meetings, make presentations on how easy it is to submit tickets. Place links to the portal in email signatures.
Communicate through the ticket, not through email so that users will acclimate to responding through the system.
Import data from the legacy systems for historical reporting.