Kwantlen University College

Client Background

Kwantlen University College is a comprehensive undergraduate university with four campuses located in British Columbia's Lower Mainland. Kwantlen offers bachelor's degrees, associate degrees, diplomas, certificates and citations in over 135 programs and serves more than 17,000 students annually.

Challenges

Kwantlen's IT organization had a fairly well established incident management function, but had not been able to enforce a single point of contact Service Desk or leverage a knowledge base to enable quicker resolution of incidents. As a result, Kwantlen IT was seeing increased aging of incidents and requests, leading to reduced customer satisfaction and unmet service targets. This was especially the case during the fall semester, when the majority of students return to campus. Moreover, Kwantlen IT had limited ability to track their service level objectives and lacked accurate data for management decision-making, thus hampering their ability to make improvements to their operation.

Approach

Kwantlen's circumstances called for an approach drawing on assistance from all three of Third Sky's core competency areas.

Through the delivery of ITIL® simulation workshops and awareness sessions for Kwantlen's entire IT organization, Third Sky's Education services ensured that Kwantlen's IT staff began to share the common language of the ITIL® framework and better internalized the lessons of the ITIL® best practices as they were being adopted at Kwantlen.

Third Sky's Process Consulting services guided Kwantlen through:

• The creation of a Service Catalog built with a customer focus and delivered in an actionable format on their website. This created a foundation for a common point of reference between IT and its customers regarding what services are provided, and allowed direct access to the Request Fulfillment process by users.
• Definition and implementation of Incident Management, Problem Management, and Configuration Management processes that leveraged Kwantlen's IT Service Management toolset. This was executed with a focus on efficiency of incident handling, collection of appropriate management data and improved root cause analysis for rapid issue resolution and problem elimination.
• Creation of a multi-phase roadmap for continuing to mature Kwantlen's IT Service Management processes.

Kwantlen's User Support Manager, Paula Hannas, explained that "the most valuable work that Third Sky did with Kwantlen was the workshop on the Service Catalogue. That is when the lights went on for the core team and when they really took ownership of the Service Catalogue creation project and how it would impact Kwantlen."

Third Sky's Technology Services helped Kwantlen implement the iET Solutions' ITSM solution to seamlessly support the key ITIL® processes described above. The technology solution was rolled out in time to meet the service management needs of the busiest time of the academic calendar. The ITSM implementation included automation of requests received from legacy systems, LDAP authentication, and customer self-service access for service request and incident logging directly to the Service Desk via the Service Catalog published on the Kwantlen website.

"Another valuable service that Third Sky provided to Kwantlen was the ITSM planning workshop and subsequent project management assistance. The Kwantlen implementation team respected Third Sky's knowledge and skill and this gave them confidence to forge on; greatly contributing to the project's successful implementation - on time, on budget, and with the whole department on board. Kudos to Third Sky!" emphasized Paula Hannas.

Benefits Achieved

Kwantlen dramatically improved their ability to gather metrics for the identification of problem areas, significantly improved root cause analysis and problem definition, and increased incident and service request handling capacity. These improvements have supported faster incident resolution for users (including improved response to classroom issues within the period for that class) and an increase in first-call resolution. The Service Desk is now empowered as the single point of contact for customers and customer satisfaction has increased.

Kwantlen is now actively monitoring, managing, and improving their Service Operation performance and beginning to execute on the next phases of their IT Service Management maturity roadmap. This means that benefits already achieved will be built upon, rather than fading over time.

Robert Ball, Kwantlen's System Support Technologist Supervisor, described Third Sky as "the best consulting firm I have ever worked with."