Alan’s Blog

Another statistic from our help desk is the percentage of jobs that we have managed to complete within the service levels that we measure ourselves against.
 
2003/04                   96.9%
2004/05                   90.9%
2005/06                   67.0%
 
What are the service levels we manage ourselves against I hear you ask?
Well, the helpdesk system we use was set-up for use with corporate IT and curricular calls are limited by the categories corporate support uses. This gives us 3 categories of call:
Urgent where we endeavor to fix the problem within 1 day
Normal where we endeavor to fix the problem within 3 days
Low where we endeavor to fix the problem within 2 weeks.
 
By default all curricular calls start off as low priority and are managed by the Desktop Services Team Leader (DSTL). The DSTL allocates them to specific ICT Officers and amends the priority as appropriate.
 
Last year saw a startling difference in the percentage of calls that we managed to complete within the targets we set ourselves. There are a number of reasons for this. The main ones are:
a) 2005/06 saw the largest volume of equipment leases that had to be carried out during term time. Whilst this was happening helpdesk jobs were second in our priorities.
b) 2005/06 saw across the board updates of the Apple Mac OS. Whilst IT staff were visiting all of our Apple Macs to upgrade them helpdesk jobs were again relegated to second in the priority list.
c) Many more Primary school jobs which generally take longer and involve more traveling.
d) Primary school infrastructure is more complex than secondary with much greater reliance on mobile technology.
e) In 2004/05 when the service was beginning to creak IT were able to finance a contractor to work with the team for 6 months. Budgets didn’t allow this to happen in 2005/6.