“If you want to support your staff and users properly, you need to have a great service desk, one that you can flow backward and forward.” Caron Du Plessis, Director of Information Management and Systems
About St. Peter’s Schools
St Peter’s Schools is an Anglican Diocesan family of schools located in Johannesburg, South Africa. With a lengthy tradition of setting high academic standards dating back to 1950, the organization has grown from the original preparatory school for boys to five co-educational prep and pre-prep schools and a post-secondary school, St. Peter’s College. Operating as a private educational institution, St. Peter’s maintains a strong dedication to the quality of its curriculum, sports, and cultural programs and has built a reputation for delivering an optimal learning experience for each student.
In fulfilling the school’s motto of “ahead of the game, behind every child,” the local Anglican Diocese, the Board of Trustees, Headmasters, and faculty are deeply invested in ensuring the school’s facilities, classrooms, campus grounds, and instructional and technological resources are scrupulously configured and rigorously maintained.
Challenge
Since its founding seventy-two years ago, St. Peter’s Schools has significantly expanded from its original one-room schoolhouse with 12 students. Today, the school includes four buildings on a primary campus in Johannesburg and a secondary campus in the suburb of Sunninghill. The faculty and student populations have also grown to 320 faculty and administrators and 1,300 students.
As the number of schools under the St. Peter’s charter grew, the complexity of meeting the needs of faculty, pupils, and administrators increased proportionally, resulting in delays in facilities service response and inefficient delivery of IT support.
Without a formal ticketing solution, service requests were sent exclusively through telephone and email. The manual logging of tickets and the lack of timestamping and resolution tracking was taxing the two-person IT department, and a new approach was essential.
Volunteering to take on the task of reviewing potential solutions, Caron Du Plessis, Director of Information Management and Systems, began reviewing options. Having joined St. Peter’s Schools eight years ago as an administrative assistant, Du Plessis had gradually transitioned into overseeing the thriving private school’s use of technology. Following her promotion to head of IT three years ago, she moved solving the nagging service desk issues to the top of her list.
Previous IT staff had adopted Spiceworks to address the ticketing requirements, primarily due to the cost-free status of the solution. While Du Plessis felt the rudimentary shareware provided a simple framework for the help desk services being delivered, it couldn’t support the ease of use and immediacy she knew users demanded.
“It didn’t offer a mobile app which we thought was crucial for simplifying and expediting service requests,” she remembers. “Teachers don’t have the time to go in and send an email. They have a minute or two to log the problem and then go on with their day.”
To address the absence of mobile phone functionality, many faculty had begun using WhatsApp as a quick fix. While this offered the benefit of encryption for privacy and security, WhatsApp wasn’t integrated with ticketing and provided poor traceability. Ultimately, Du Plessis said the experience with Spiceworks imbued her team with a greater appreciation for the magnitude of the support challenges yet to be solved.
Solution
As the newly appointed department head, Du Plessis set about restructuring IT. Having seen the demands upon the fledgling support staff grow profoundly, it was obvious that more personnel with tightly defined responsibilities was requisite. With the approval of the Board of Trustees, she engaged the services of an IT consultancy specializing in digital transformation strategies. The jointly managed evaluation resulted in the creation of several new roles: a project manager, an IT manager, and two frontline support positions. An outside contractor was selected for tier 2, 3, and 4 support to handle service call overflow.
Among the first projects the newly installed team tackled was a review of best-of-breed help desk solutions. A shortlist was drawn up based on three non-negotiable deliverables:
- Cloud-based
- Fully integrated mobile app
- ITIL compliant
- SSO (Single-Sign On) Authentication
After careful analysis of online reviews, suggestions from colleagues, and TrustRadius
profiles, Du Plessis and her team choose four help desk candidates: Jira by Atlassian, Zendesk, SolarWinds Help Desk, and a custom solution from the consultancy. Even during the vetting and installation process Du Plessis said the SolarWinds advantage was clear.
“From the minute our SolarWinds representative provided an online demonstration, we were impressed with his willingness to take the time to explain its functionality and the patience to answer our large volume of emailed questions during the decision-making process,” she states.
Having been provided with a Help Desk demo license to explore, the team took note of the intuitive interface and simplicity of bringing the instance on Windows Server live for immediate use.
“Implementing the SolarWinds Support Desk cemented the transformation journey for the IT Team,” Du Plessis adds. “It was a very logical process from the start.”
Results
With a full two years of deployment in the rear-view mirror, the IT staff and St. Peter’s School administrators agree that the impact of Service Desk on the user experience, service delivery, and cost-efficiencies has been measurable.
“Having an easy-to-use and efficient solution to support our stakeholders and ensure our teachers spend more time teaching than fighting with a ticketing solution cannot be overstated,” she comments. “I could get ten teachers to tell me how much of an improvement Service Desk is. For me, that’s something.”
Following the successful launch within the IT department, Du Plessis shifted her focus to delivering similar efficiencies in the Facilities Maintenance Department. Choosing appropriate pre-configured templates from the Service Desk library, the IT team developed a solution optimized for handling electrical, plumbing, HVAC, and other common issue categories.
“Our maintenance people were struggling under a large volume of calls logged, and this understandably gave them a very disjointed view of what was going on,” Du Plessis recalls. “We needed a better way to log calls and have better transparency of knowing problems had been solved.”
Always cost-conscious, Du Plessis says school officials elected to start with a five-user license, and to date, that has proven sufficient. A big plus, she adds, was the licensing model, which didn’t require paying for functionality deemed unnecessary to meet their needs.
“Unlike other solutions, with Service Desk, we didn’t have to pay for modules that are of no value to us. In the end, we didn’t even look at the price.”
In summarizing the highest value benefits delivered by the SolarWinds solution, Du Plessis and her staff compiled the following list:
- Fast user adoption: “Here is your login; here is the training.”
- Improved call response time with the ability to track service calls from any device on campus
- Efficient call assignment by automatically allocating the calls based on IT staff member location
- Total transparency of tickets and assignees keep everyone accountable
- Mobile device notification speeds ability to arrive on-scene
- Better personnel scheduling with personnel log-in/log-out function
In addition to the efficiencies gained in handling tickets and accelerating issue resolution, Du Plessis adds that the granularity of the data available from Service Desk assists greatly in resource planning, giving the necessary visibility for IT budgeting, hiring, and allocation of infrastructure.
“For me, it allows the school to realize how big or small we need the team and to resource accordingly,” she states. “As time passes, we keep in mind to position Service Desk in a way that is not intimidating for non-IT staff. We don’t call it an IT solution – we call it St. Peter’s Support Desk”.
Product Mix
Location: Johannesburg, South Africa
Year Founded: 1950
Employees: 320
IT Environment: On-prem, Google Apps
Other Solutions Considered
Spiceworks
“The lack of a mobile app was a drawback because we wanted it to be fast and easy for users to send out a help request”
Jira (Atlassian)
“It became clear this would not be easy to set up and there would be a learning curve. SolarWinds Service Desk worked right out of the box”
Zendesk
“The complicated set up was beyond our in-house capabilities and the dashboard was confusing.”
