U of Michigan Lowers TCO and Improves ITSM Process & Outcomes

March 28, 2022

Brooke Tajer

CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT

The platform was easy to use, it was SaaS-delivered, and required no coding knowledge for users to create custom forms and workflows.

With a community of 46,000 students and 25,000 faculty and staff on the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus alone, providing high-quality, collaborative IT services is a significant undertaking. It requires well-designed tools and processes that are laser-focused on customer service and aligned with the university’s goals.

A focus on IT service management

Information and Technology Services (ITS) developed a vision for what it hoped to achieve, with the goal of better serving users and delivering an exceptional customer experience. The university’s ITS team set out to find an IT service management (ITSM) platform that could help them identify problems and repeated requests, automate workflows, and help users find their own answers to questions whenever possible. They also wanted to invest in a future vision that would allow them to embrace a true enterprise service. U-M discovered TeamDynamix.

The platform was easy to use, it was SaaS-delivered, and required no coding knowledge for users to create customized forms and workflows. The platform was flexible enough to support the university where it is now while positioning it for future IT processes. The university went fully live in four months. The scope of the initial launch included automated workflows for initiating and fulfilling service tickets; requesting, evaluating, and tracking the status of projects; and managing a rapidly growing knowledge base of articles.

The enterprise site licensing model for TeamDynamix allows the university to have more people resolving service tickets, resulting in improved problem resolution and an improved experience for students, faculty, and staff.

Enterprise service expansion

The enterprise site licensing model for TeamDynamix allows the university to have more people resolving service tickets, resulting in improved problem resolution and an improved experience for students, faculty, and staff. This was put into practice amid the shift to remote learning when the pandemic emerged, helping ITS respond to a sharp spike in service requests.

Ease of administration

The platform also allows for distributed management, which the team administering the platform found to be helpful in setting up ticketing applications for multiple units across the university. University units such as Facilities and Operations, Shared Services, and the School for Environment and Sustainability have their own applications within the platform for fulfilling service requests. The tool allows units to manage their own ticketing applications by developing the detailed forms and workflows they need to support their own processes.

Improved customer experience

ITS set up a shared ticketing application, called The Hub, that staff can use to move a ticket from one unit to another. Rather than telling people to hang up and call another department if their service request fell under another unit’s purview, any department can create a service ticket and seamlessly transfer it to another team, resulting in an improved user experience. The combination of simplified processes, clear business objectives, and an appropriate tool to support them has resulted in improved IT service for faculty, staff, and students across the entire U-M community.