Continual Service Improvement & Feedback | The University of Sunderland

UIT Continual Service Improvement & Feedback

In this ever changing world, it is important to be able to understand how the many changes we face on an almost daily basis affect us all. It is also important to have defined processes in place to alow us to flex our ways of working where required to remain as productive, flexible and efficient as we can be.

CSI, Continual Service Improvement is a well recognised feature of the ITIL best practice framework which we follow in UIT. We embrace the CSI process and through good relations with all stakeholders, we listen to and evaluate all feedback provided. This feedback often leads to a service change or improvement for many.

Stephen Dobson

UIT Service Delivery Manager

Give us your Feedback ..... we really want to know

While we can look internally at the quality of what we do it is so much more useful if we can receive feedback directly from users of our services. This will often give us insights from colleagues' perspectives that may not have been on our radar and we can then look specifically at areas that are either working well or are not working so well and could be improved.

We have 2 ways that we would like to receive your feedback:

Service Desk - IT Portal - If your feedback relates specifically to a support request you have made then, when the request ticket is resolved you will be sent a Customer Satisfaction (CSat) survey email where you can say if you were satisfied or disatisfied and leave some further detail. We really do appreciate it when further comments are included, as this helps us better understand which parts of what we do are working and which may not be.

Email - We have a new feedback email address which we are advertising should feedback be either more general or, for many reasons, wouldn't be appropriate to send via the IT Portal. This mailbox is managed by the Service Delivery CoOrdinators and Service Delivery Manager and our aim is to respond to each piece of feedback within 24 hours. If you wish to send us your feedback via email please send it to uitfeedback@sunderland.ac.uk. Please note, to keep our channels for support manageable and measureable, this email address is for feedback and escalations only and not as another way to log support requests.

Sharing feedback with our teams is essential to CSI and we do this real time and monthly as a part of our Management Information analysis.

Customer Satisfaction Scores

Our current Customer Satisfaction score over a rolling year to date at the end of January 2020 is: 98%

This is based on:

16301 - Tickets Resolved

6303 - Tickets responded to (39%)

Of those tickets that were responded to:

6174 - Satisfied (98%)

129 - Unsatisfied (2%)

Solar Winds Service Desk - Updates

Our Service Desk tooling application, Solar Winds Service Desk, formally Samanage, known by many as the IT Portal, will be undergoing regular updates to both the User Interface (UI - look and feel) and to it's content and functionality.

Where the updates affect how people will use the system, we will publish these updates below.

As always, if you have any feedback on the IT Portal we'd like to hear from you via the uitfeedback@sunderland.ac.uk inbox.

Update - 07/02/2020

Live Chat - The trial has been postponed and will return during Quarter 1 2020.

IT "Chat"will be similar to many well known support services and will provide a quick, real time way of chatting with your colleagues in UIT and we imagine will be used to ask quick questions, check the status of systems and get general advice. Chat conversations can also be converted very simply into a support ticket if required.

UIT Service Delivery - Changes to our Operating Model

We have recently changed our operating model to better support the University's Digital First initiative and meet the many and varied demands placed upon the Service Delivery Team.

We now have dedicated extensions to call for urgent Classroom failures. These are:

3334 - St. Peter's Campus URGENT AV Support

3335 - City Campus URGENT AV Support

We have also relocated our 1st/2nd line telephone support team to St. Peter's Gate where they now sit in amongst our 3rd line specialists. This will lead to upskilling of the Service Delivery Team and in turn lead to quicker resolutions to support tickets.

We now have dedicated on campus support and co-ordination. Staff not working on first line support will be based on both St. Peter's and City campuses ready to support staff and student at their desk or via the walk up helpdesks.

The above has meant we have had to reduce the hours that we can open the walk up helpdesks. We are still open three days a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday 10.00 a.m. - 14.00 p.m. and by appointment outside of these hours.

We will be running with the new operating model until the end of the year and will assess the effectivness and impact of the changes then.

"Self Help" suggestions wanted.

Some of the support we provide is actually for things colleagues can do themselves and is therefore really IT awareness or training. We'd really like to hear from you if you have any suggestions of any self help guides that you would like to see pubished and available it the IT Portal. Examples might be how to set up email on an new mobile phone or how to get access to software that you are entitled to as a member of the University of Sunderland student or staff population.

If you have any suggestions please email uitfeedback@sunderland.ac.uk and we will do our best to add the information to our searchable knowledge base.

Previous posts:

The IT Portal is now available on the 3 Self Help Kiosks located in the Gateway, Prospect Building, St. Peter's Campus, The Gateway, City Campus and Muray Library, City Campus. This means you are now able to get in touch with University IT while you are out and about without having to wait until you get back to your desk or PC.

In IT Support there are two types of regular requests we receive from colleagues accessing our service. Each often requiring different resources to complete and where possible we would like to be able to separate these types of requests so we can report specifically on them.

They are Incidents and Service Requests.

One challenge we have is to find a way of describing the differences between Incidents and Service Requersts so our colleagues can log the right type of ticket which allows us to better understand where we are spending our support time and why. For example, if requests for new email addresses are logged as a fault, then over a period of time would produce misleading data.

Incidents - Reporting a fault. - An Incident ticket would be appropriate for reporting a fault. Whether this is a small fault affecting one person or system or a really significant service outage which would lead to a major incident, rasing an Incident ticket is the correct type of support ticket to raise.

Service Requests - These tickets and templates are to be found on the front page and the Service Catalogue tab of the IT Portal. This support ticket type is appropriate when a colleague is requesting something new. For example, access to a shared data area, requesting a new calendar and setting up a new starter are all valid service requests and where possible we have provided a template to use which will ask for info specific to the request.