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University of Southern Queensland Expands Its Ivanti Solutions Portfolio to Enable Greater Remote Working During COVID-19

Wed, 29 Jul 2020 22:43:26 Z

As COVID-19 unfolded, USQ quickly provided faculty and administrative staff working remotely a portal to access Knowledge articles, FAQs, and other key information all in one place.
Before the mad rush of staff leaving with their devices to work from home, USQ quickly installed the Ivanti agent on 2,600 devices with help from Ivanti partner Fusion 5..
Going live in April 2017, Ivanti Service Manager in the cloud is also now an enterprise service management tool. Virtually every department has a form in USQ’s dedicated staff knowledgebase—HR, Facilities, Legal, Faculty, Student Service teams, Marketing teams, and more.

Ask Naomi Lutvey what it’s like working at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) in Toowoomba, Australia and her genuine reply will be “Fantastic!” Naomi has worked at USQ for 25 years and currently serves as its Director of Client Services for ICT Services within the Enterprise Services Division.

Situated west of Brisbane about 1.5 hours by car, Toowoomba is nicknamed “The Garden City”, with a population of around 137,000. USQ has three campuses: the main Toowoomba campus and two other sites in the cities of Ipswich and Springfield, respectively.

“Toowoomba isn’t a large city, and our university is considered a regional institution, enrolling approximately 26,000 students,” Naomi says. “We are primarily a distance-education provider, with around 75% of our students attending online. We were one of the first institutions in Australia to provide distance education, and the majority of our degrees can be completed via online study. It’s been our bread and butter for a very long time, so we’re pretty good at delivering online content now.”

Students of More Mature Age

Naomi explains that USQ attracts students of more mature age due to the flexibility of online learning. Students can study at night after the kids have gone to bed. In addition, many students of mature years who never thought they could attend university are doing so via a number of Pathway Programs. USQ also offers people opportunities to “upskill” through four-week Short Courses.

“Our Short Courses have been attractive, particularly for people who have found themselves out of work due to the coronavirus pandemic,” Naomi says. “We’ve done a lot of work around the ‘upskill’ effort, creating the opportunity for people to undertake study to not only give them something to do while they’re unemployed, but to help boost their self-confidence and enhance their resume.”

She adds, “I love graduation time because you see the moms and dads attending graduation with their little kids. The effort involved with working full-time, raising a family, and taking six years to complete their degree part-time—how awesome is that? It’s pretty amazing.”

“I love graduation time because you see the moms and dads attending graduation with their little kids. The effort involved with working full-time, raising a family, and taking six years to complete their degree part-time—how awesome is that? It’s pretty amazing.”

A Full Plate of IT Responsibilities

With the help of Ivanti partner, Fusion 5, ICT went live with Ivanti® Service Manager in the cloud in April 2017, upgrading from HEAT Classic, to help deal with an increasingly full plate of IT support tasks. Naomi and her staff of 60 Information and Communications Technology (ICT) professionals are heavily involved with the customer side of the service experience, looking after the service desk, information management, reporting, training, relationship management, and collaboration.

ICT also employs students in Student Support Assistant roles who function as Student Relationship Officers (SROs). In fact, earlier this year these support services were combined with the library and other areas of the University under the “iConnect” umbrella to provide front-end or T1 support for all student inquiries offered through these SROs.

“Our SROs receive considerable training and acquire the skills to answer Tier 1-type inquiries—for example, items pertaining to our learning environment, how to reset a password, how to set up a wireless connection—so that not everything needs to funnel through the service desk,” Naomi says.

COVID-19, Remote Working, and the Need for Knowledge Articles

Ivanti Service Manager in the cloud was put to the test most recently in the face of COVID-19, which lead to university employees needing to work remotely.

“When COVID-19 unfolded, we were asked to support some other areas of the University by quickly providing faculty and administrative staff a portal to access Knowledge articles, FAQs, and other information all in one place,” Naomi says. “We also helped create a service form to track staff requests to work from home. Back in January we started trialing certain areas to move off campus to see if the technology would work and whether staff would be able to keep up with their workload. We were fairly certain things were going to escalate.”

By March, as Naomi says, “things had gone pear shaped. We had created the needed forms so that pretty much every staff member at USQ, apart from a very, very small number, could work from home. We could report back to the executives on how many people would be working from home and where, which USQ assets and any other peripheral devices they were taking with them—all sorts of things.”

Patching Remote Devices Made Easy After Rapid Deployment of Endpoint Management

Another challenge in the midst of the pandemic was the need to patch, configure, and maintain devices remotely, which in turn called for the use of the Ivanti Endpoint Manager—a solution USQ didn’t have as yet.

Naomi explains, “So we reached out to our Ivanti partner, Fusion 5, so that we could at least have around 2,600 devices of staff reporting back before the mad rush of staff leaving for home with their devices. We didn’t need to manage them yet—but needed the agent out there so we could start pushing out patches via Endpoint Manager.”

“In one way,” she says, “COVID-19 was the best thing that happened to us because it allowed us to move ahead very, very quickly and demonstrate the reasons why we wanted to manage remote devices without staff needing to be connected to a VPN.”

“In one way, COVID-19 was the best thing that happened to us,” Naomi says, “because it allowed us to move ahead very, very quickly and demonstrate the reasons why we wanted to manage remote devices without staff needing to be connected to a VPN.”

ELA: Ivanti’s Flexible Software Licensing Vehicle

Naomi adds, “We’ve since signed an Enterprise License Agreement (ELA). But the support from Fusion 5 and Ivanti that helped us get the agent out within two weeks was just phenomenal. We would have been in a pickle otherwise.”

The Ivanti ELA is a flexible software licensing vehicle. It enables customers to take advantage of Ivanti’s full portfolio to unify their IT and deploy solutions that match their business initiatives—without spinning up a new procurement cycle or worrying about where to find budget for each initiative.

Concerning this “full portfolio”, Naomi says software license management has been a challenge. “As you can imagine, we get a lot of tickets for requests for software applications, so with the purchase of a full ELA we’re working out our plan of attack for integrating Ivanti Service Manager with asset management, automation, and endpoint management capabilities.

“That means when a customer requests a piece of software in our catalog, they’ll be able to hit ‘request’, it will go to their supervisor or whomever for approval, and it will get installed whether they’re on campus or not, because we’re using Ivanti. We won’t touch it. That’s where we’re going, and I cannot wait until we get to that point.”

Flexible, Configurable Service Management Automates Processes Across University Departments

When asked if there’s something about Ivanti Service Manager that Naomi wasn’t expecting, she replies, “It’s configurable. I can’t emphasize that enough. There is no coding—it’s all configuration. And the flexibility which that has allowed us is enormous. The Ivanti Service Manager instances are now essentially an enterprise service management tool. Virtually every department in the University now has a form in our dedicated staff knowledgebase—HR, Facilities, Legal, Faculty, Student Service teams, Marketing teams, etc.”

Naomi says she received a letter of support from the executive manager of one of the University’s faculty areas that capsulized why faculty love the tool so much:

Provides consistency in services provided; all staff follow the same process and receive the same information.
It reduces manual processes and increases the ability to enforce guidelines and approval processes.
Ability to store process documentation in the Knowledge Center.
The chances of things going missing in someone’s personal email inbox are gone.
Oh, wow! This does this, and I can do all these things now and I can report all this information. I can keep track of what my staff are doing. I know how much workload they’ve got and whether we need to add additional resources to that team.

According to Naomi, this all came about organically. “Yeah, it was definitely organic. We didn’t do any sales pitch or something we were seeking purposely. People came to us saying, ‘Wow, I really like your tool; it looks really good. Can we have access to that and get a form?’ and we replied, ‘Sure, you can. What do you need?’ And I think that’s probably what’s made it work—the fact that we’ve never said no.”

“People came to us saying, ‘Wow, I really like your tool; it looks really good. Can we have access to that and get a form?’ and we replied, ‘Sure, you can. What do you need?’ And I think that’s probably what’s made it work—the fact that we’ve never said no.”

When asked what she would say about Ivanti Service Manager to an organization looking for a new ITSM tool, Naomi replies, “I would say definitely give it a go. It’s awesome. We’ve been very, very happy and the support we’ve received has been great. I can’t wait until we get our full Ivanti ELA implemented with all the modules. The response from the various University departments tells us it’s obvious this is where things needed to go. It’s gone above and beyond what we ever thought it would be.”

Note: A customer’s results are specific to its total environment/experience, of which Ivanti is a part. Individual results may vary based on each customer’s unique environment

Victoria University: Student and Staff Satisfaction with Their IT Service Experience Nearly Doubles with Help from Ivanti

Wed, 17 Jun 2020 15:44:05 Z

IT’s Net Promoter Score has jumped to 90% from around 54% to 60%.
Victoria University received “Most Improved Student Services” award
Thanks to preparedness of all IT teams, the university shifted quickly to total online instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic

Take a moment to search “customer engagement” and you’ll find Stephen Peatling’s picture.

Okay, that’s a stretch.

But at Victoria University (VU) in Melbourne, Australia, it’s safe to say Peatling is the “ePeatome” of IT customer engagement and support—working in the field for nearly 25 years.

Before arriving at VU nearly three years ago, he worked in management for local government in positions spanning IT, business analysis, and quality assurance. Stephen recalls, “The thing I loved most in those opportunities was the customer-service aspect and the genuine customer engagement—making our customers’ lives better wherever they work to ensure that they can do their jobs properly.”

VU offers both vocational training and higher education, meaning that students can start their education journey with VU Polytechnic at certificate level and proceed to a diploma, degree, or even a PhD at Victoria University—exiting at any point to pursue work and returning to further their study when they choose. VU has eight colleges, six research institutes, and seven research centers among nine campuses in Melbourne’s CBD and western region, and a 10^th campus in Sydney. Nearly 43,000 students, including around 13,500 international students, study VU courses worldwide and benefit from the University’s unique Block Model of course delivery.

Promoted as “A New Way to do Uni”, the VU Block Model enables students to focus on one unit or subject at a time over a four-week block. Students complete the block, receive their results, and recharge over a few days before starting the next block.

Contrast this approach with the traditional university model where students juggle multiple subjects with their respective competing assignment and exam deadlines over a semester. VU is the first university in Australia to introduce the Block Model, building on the proven successes of block programs at universities in Sweden, Canada, and the US.

Since the Block Model’s introduction in 2018, VU students are performing better than ever, with an impressive pass rate of 86.5%.

Well-Seasoned IT Team

The University’s IT Services group (ITS) numbers around 300 employees, including Stephen’s team of 43 IT professionals. Stephen has a full management plate, looking after the Support Desk; the Client Services Desk, which is face-to-face support; the Remote Team, which handles remote support over the phone; Audio Visual Services throughout the University; and also VIP training and support for the University as well.

“My team here has been well established for a long time, and we have very little turnover in my area of customer engagement,” he says.

Need to Innovate a 10-Year-Old IT Ticketing System

One of the first things Stephen noticed upon arriving at VU was the legacy HEAT service management system. (The 2017 merger of HEAT Software and LANDESK, Inc., formed Ivanti). The HEAT system had been installed about 10 years earlier, but, according to Stephen, VU was only really employing it as an IT ticketing system, with no significant improvements or innovation added since.

He explains that to enter a ticket, customers either had to call the service desk or send an email, and then that email would be copied and pasted into the ticketing system. But each time someone in IT touched a job in the ticketing system it would send off an email to the customer.

“This was one of our biggest customer complaints,” Stephen says. “‘You’re sending me all this junk email. I’m not even reading it anymore. I’ve actually put a rule in Outlook to delete it straight away so it goes out of our system.’”

Another significant complaint was that customers didn’t know what was happening with their job, along the lines of: “I logged the job four weeks ago and haven’t heard anything about it. It’s still an issue. What’s going on?”

It’s Not “Students” and “Staff”—They’re All “Customers”

In those early months as a new manager at VU, Stephen says he devoted most of his time to figuring out “how to get the communication working properly with our customers, because it just wasn’t happening at all.” He was also getting more accustomed to the legacy system and embarked on a process to further develop and update it within VU to the modern Ivanti® Service Manager solution. This included hiring a manager and a staff member to administer and support the new solution.

Stephen explains, “We had a great relationship with University staff members, and they would provide constructive feedback on what was good and bad about our system. However, the customer experience of our students was really poor. Over that year I tried to change the culture to say ‘a customer is a customer no matter what’, and that we had to set up our systems to advise the customer—not a ‘staff member’ and not a ‘student’—but a customer. They’re all the same to me and they all have the same service level agreement.”

Among the feedback received was a request for new templates—not just words on a screen. The team responded by creating new, concise templates, broken into sections for easier reading. This effort included color-coding status of the service request: green for “complete”; yellow, indicating an “update”; red if there’s still a ‘major issue”.

“Within the first few months of implementing the feedback through new templates, etc., the feedback we received was, well, no feedback,” Stephen says. “No one was ringing up asking, ‘What's happened to my job?’ or ‘Where is this at?’ and that sort of thing. From our customers’ perspective we made massive change, and this would be the way we’d communicate moving forward.”

“The feedback we received was, well, no feedback. No one was ringing up asking, ‘What's happened to my job?’ or ‘Where is this at?’ and that sort of thing.”

Stephen adds, “Having the team in place that we do has contributed significantly to what we’ve done with Ivanti Service Manager. It’s become a great way of communicating.”

Improved Insights and Service-Level Agreement Compliance

The next phase of the IT team’s effort was to tackle service-level agreements (SLAs) and reports. “We weren’t doing anything with SLAs whatsoever,” Stephen says. “And we got really deficient reports about what was and what wasn’t being breached. And no one across ITS was looking at reports at all, in any division, about SLAs.”

Stephen says he spoke with the local Ivanti team about the need for real-time reporting and the requirement to run daily statistics and send out monthly SLA statistics. “That’s when Ivanti introduced its Xtraction solution to us,” he says. “And I have to say it’s been absolutely life-changing. That’s when we arrived ‘at the top of the mountain’ and could see where we were going and what we needed to do.”

He continues, “Firstly, we saw where we needed to improve on our resourcing in different campuses and so on because we could actually see in real time—for the first time ever and on a daily basis—where jobs were breaching. We could see backlogs and the determine to send someone out to this or that campus.”

“We could actually see in real time—for the first time ever and on a daily basis—where jobs were breaching. We could see backlogs and the determine to send someone out to this or that campus.”

Stephen explains that his team also started to create monthly reports for ITS directors and managers to help them assess how they had been performing over the past 12 months. “I just can’t emphasize enough that data is power. If you look at the history of the last two years, we were very “red”; we had failed SLAs completely. However, in the month we started to introduce monthly reporting through Xtraction, everything started to move to green.”

He adds, “Once our people had the data and knowledge on what they need to do to fix the issues, that’s when we started to turn everything around. Customers really started to notice that we were responsive, we’re meeting our SLAs, and we’re really trying to improve on our customer service. Personally, that was my main focus all the way. And then the next phase of the Xtraction program was to start rolling out monthly SLAs to all of VU’s colleges to assess ITS’ service-delivery performance.”

“Most Improved Student Services” Award

Stephen reports that VU last year won the “Most Improved Student Services” award—a benchmarking survey conducted across many universities in the nation. He credits the recognition to how well his team has implemented Ivanti Service Manager and Xtraction, the communication and outreach with students, and the performance reporting being produced.

“The turnaround point for me was with our students,” Stephen says. “The amount of effort that we put into actually communicating with our students was phenomenal. We’re now doing yearly surveys of our students and staff and customer service has gone through the roof. So have our phone services.”

Nearly Doubling the Net Promoter Score

Stephen says that when he first joined VU, the IT team’s Net Promoter Score—a management tool employed to gauge the loyalty or satisfaction of customers—was down around 54% to 60%. “Today we’re currently sitting at an NPS of 90% as shown by our surveys. The number of students and staff actually completing that NPS survey is just amazing now, and it speaks for itself. The culture shift we’ve tried to implement in the customer service area has worked, but it’s also worked because we’ve had the right software tool behind it.”

Customer Care During COVID-19

Like so many universities across the globe, VU students are currently attending classes remotely due to the coronavirus pandemic. “We experienced a bit of an influx in service requests for the first few days when students shifted to online instruction, but we were prepared, largely due to the preparation all the other IT teams put together,” Stephen says. “Through our efforts with Ivanti Service Manager, a big plus for us is that our team has been recognized for how customer service should be run within the University.”

“Through our efforts with Ivanti Service Manager, a big plus for us is that our team has been recognized for how customer service should be run within the University.”

He adds that ITS had implemented a number of walk-up, on-campus IT service kiosks where students could receive help face-to-face with service staff. The kiosks and the service have been highly popular with students, and the kiosks will re-open when it’s safe to do so at some point in the future.

Looking Ahead

Stephen explains that over the next six months, other IT teams will be coming onto Ivanti Service Manager, including Finance, Procurement, and Library Services. It’s been an amazing transformation story. All it really took was making sure that we had the right setup within Service Manager, that we could see the data through Xtraction, and then really promote a customer service-focused result.”

His counsel for other organizations considering Ivanti Service Manager? “The best things I could sell someone on are the customer experience, the journey of accomplishment that we’ve been on, and the vast improvement in our NPS score. It’s because of the system we’ve implemented AND our great customer service team. The Ivanti tool is the backbone of that team. If you want to improve your service relationship with your customers, you need a tool like this to do it.”

It’s because of the system we’ve implemented AND our great customer service team. The Ivanti tool is the backbone of that team. If you want to improve your service relationship with your customers, you need a tool like this to do it.”