Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

We have over 100 student employees in all, mostly in Instructional Media Services and the ITS Helpdesk. They do a fantastic job in what they are asked to do and are the face of ITS in the many areas that they help support. I thought I will take this time to thank them for the excellent job they do as well as talk about some of the recent organizational changes that is relevant to them.

The first and foremost thing that I would like to see is that all of our student and temporary employees file their timesheets on time. I want to make sure that this is addressed to only those who don’t file their timesheet on time. I will be happy to share the data that we have collected over the past several months with anyone who is interested. Basically, we have not had a single week pass us by where we have not had late submissions. This is really frustrating given that we have an electronic process for recording time and approval by the supervisor. The resources that are spent handling late submissions is simply too much…

In order for this to work flawlessly, the student employee must do his/her own part of finalizing the timesheet in a timely manner and the appropriate manager (student or ITS staff) needs to finalize and submit the timesheets by Monday 9 AM. This requires discipline and frankly, we are not asking too much…

The next topic that has generated a lot of interest is the reorganization of desktop support, especially the administrative desktop support to make it resemble a centralized Helpdesk. The student Helpdesk will be part of  this new unit. There are many reasons for doing this, but I will talk about the reasons that are relevant to the student Helpdesk.

One of the things that I would like to see is a much closer interaction between the student employees of ITS and the ITS staff. This interaction is important and it does not happen enough for various reasons. I don’t want to imply that these interactions don’t happen, it is just that we should look for ways to increase it.

Why do I feel that this interaction is important? It is important that we provide high quality support services that is coherent and professional. If the various support units don’t interact well and communicate, the quality of support is compromised and efforts are fractured and duplicated. Documentation is a good example – we have some documentation that ITS staff members produce and we find a separate documentation tree being maintained by the Helpdesk. And there are inconsistencies between the two and duplication.

So, by having an organizational structure that promotes stronger interaction between the students and the ITS staff, I believe that everyone can benefit. I don’t want to go into the specifics here, because I would like to see it develop collaboratively over the next few months. The goal is to make sure that the professional staff and the students work together to provide a high quality support. It is my hope that we will collectively find ways to build on everyone’s strengths (like finding the appropriate areas that the student helpdesk is better suited to support and not to expect them to support some of the core administrative systems that they rarely use themselves).

Based on what I have heard from our own staff, helpdesk and other institutions, in order for the helpdesk support model to work, we will need strong industrial strength support software – inventory system, ticketing system, documentation, and remote control system. We will examine all these areas and make the necessary investments and acquire and implement new systems. What this means is that we will all be doing support differently than how we have done it in the recent past. Note that these changes are not only going to affect the way the student staff work, but also ITS staff.

In the proposed model, the ITS Helpdesk will consist of three professional staff and the student Helpdesk. One of these three staff members will be the Helpdesk Manager and will have the management responsibility for the student Helpdesk also. This person will report to the Director of User and Technical Services (we plan to fill this position shortly). The Helpdesk Manager will work closely with the student managers and student staff of the current Helpdesk to accomplish the goals discussed above.

I also would like to see if there are other areas in which we can involve the students – networking and programming especially. It is hard on various counts. We need to find specific areas where the students can be asked to work on without compromising security. But, I feel there are opportunities and we need to look at this carefully.

This requires a serious commitment from ITS staff because it will require time commitment. But, in the end, I think this will be beneficial to everyone concerned. I can point to several students who worked either for ITS or in close collaboration with us who later became ITS employees.

Finally, all of us who hire students should remind ourselves that first and foremost they are students. Their academic commitments have to take priority over all other activities. So, when we hire them, we have to be extremely careful not to overcommit students.

I am really looking forward to working with everyone to make sure the proposed transitions take place smoothly and that in the end, we have a much stronger support organization.

Technorati Tags: student employees, helpdesk, collaboration, communication