Engineering IT receives over 30,000 service requests
Less than one year into Engineering IT’s newly implemented ticket system, the department has officially assisted in over 30,000 service requests from students and faculty within Engineering at Illinois.
The ticket system began in February of 2012 as a means of processing service requests more efficiently. The Request Tracker (RT) system keeps track of tickets sent to the various Engineering IT departments, coordinating tasks and managing requests among a community of users at the University of Illinois.
It took one month for the department to reach 1,000 tickets, but since March 12, 2012, Engineering IT has averaged over 2,800 service requests per month. And just three months separated the 20,000th and 30,000th tickets, for an average of 3,030 requests per month.
The 20,000th ticket was claimed by Akash Shah, a student worker who has been employed with the Engineering IT Helpdesk in the Coordinated Science Laboratory for two and a half years.
Shah has learned a great deal in his aid of networking technology and systems used by tech-intensive organizations. He the new ticket system has increased productivity and simplified the process of solving users’ problems.
“With the new ticket system, the workflow on a regular day has been very much simplified,” he said. “We log all requests in the ticket system as soon as we receive them, in person or by email. Transferring jobs between student workers has become much smoother as well.”
Dave Mussulman, Senior IT Specialist and owner of the 30,000th ticket, agrees that the ability to transfer service requests between various departments with their own specialties has organized the process of resolving IT issues for Engineering at Illinois.
The 30,000th ticket itself was created by a teaching assistant, and then transferred from the Helpdesk to Computer Science - Research Computing, where Mussulman nabbed the request. The process of resolving the ticket was just like any of the previous 29,999.
“For the first part of the ticket when something happens, I try to make sure I understand what they’re asking about,” he said.
Mussulman asked the user to elaborate on her request, which involved an issue of logging into a computer. After referring the user to his administrative staff for the proper office supplies for one portion of the request, he then probed about the network connectivity problem.
“What do you mean by lacking an internet connection?” Mussulman asked. “Can you be more descriptive?”
After guiding the user as to how establishing a connection through a few more emails, new problems arose. Suddenly the user was unable to log into the computer, as the admin password had disappeared along with the former owner of the Mac.
To solve the problem, Mussulman met with Jeremy Bird, a network/systems analyst who is the department’s Mac admin in the Siebel Center.
“I asked him, ‘How does that work? Do you buy a disc from the Webstore? How do you reinstall Mac OS? With the license and the media?’” Mussulman said.
Part of the RT process involves referring to Engineering IT employees with questions and reassigning tickets to proper, more suitable departments.
“All of this is outside of what I do," Mussulman said in regards to the network connectivity problem with this particular dilemma. "You get a ticket, you help out a bit, and then you hand it off to somebody else—figure out the proper route.”
As the Engineering IT staff grows and amount of service requests rises, the process of routing problems between various groups of expertise becomes all the more integral for resolving IT issues within the Engineering at Illinois.
The Engineering IT department is on pace to achieve its 40,000th ticket by the end of the Spring 2013 semester.