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Dominican University Streamlines Facilities, Operations and IT Support

CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT

"Using TeamDynamix has revolutionized the delivery of services campus-wide."

- Todd Kleine, Interim CIO

Colleges and universities across North America know TeamDynamix primarily as an IT service and project portfolio management platform. But the software’s simplicity and versatility make it very easy to deploy across a wide range of campus departments and use cases to improve service delivery.

Dominican University in Illinois, a small Catholic institution outside of Chicago with about 3,100 students and 700 employees, is using TeamDynamix for enterprise service management not just in IT but for enrollment services, campus safety, and maintenance and operations, among other departments.

Using TeamDynamix has “revolutionized” the delivery of services campus-wide, says interim CIO Todd Kleine. Requests no longer fall through the cracks, managers have more visibility into their departments’ operations, and students and faculty enjoy a better quality of service—which has improved satisfaction for all stakeholders.

Dominican University initially implemented TeamDynamix to manage IT service requests. However, it didn’t take campus officials long to see how the platform could improve service delivery across the university.

It allows for very little to fall through the cracks. Employees are clear on their tasks, and managers can keep track of the status of requests.

- James DeFily, Executive Director of Operations

Using TeamDynamix to Successfully Run Facilities and Operations

While the university’s IT department manages the bulk of the TeamDynamix platform, as other departments think of possible use cases IT works with those business units to create an application for them within the platform.

When students or employees need to request a service, they can do so through a central support portal. They simply click on the button for the appropriate department, which takes them to that department’s service page—where they can view answers to frequently asked questions from the department’s knowledge base. If they can’t find the information they need to resolve the issue for themselves, they can submit a service request. Based on the nature of their request, the ticket is routed automatically to the appropriate person for a response.

For example, if someone notices that a sink in a campus dormitory is leaking, they can go to the service portal and place a maintenance request with the Physical Plant team. The request is routed to the maintenance engineer, who would assign it to a staff member for fulfillment.

The system brings a high level of accountability to campus operations. “It allows for very little to fall through the cracks,” says James DeFily, executive director of operations for Dominican University. “Employees are clear on their tasks, and managers can keep track of the status of requests.”

DeFily’s employees are often in the field, traveling from building-to-building fulfilling service requests. They each have a university-issued smartphone, and they can access the TeamDynamix platform on their phone from anywhere on campus.

The system is configured so that DeFily receives weekly reports on the status of all service requests within his department. He can see how many tickets are still open and how quickly requests are being fulfilled. “It gives me an idea of whether we’re meeting our target goals for Service Level Agreements,” he says, noting that he can act on this information to make improvements if service is lagging. He also has insight into each employee’s workload, so he can make better staffing decisions.

Revolutionizing Enterprise Service Management

Before becoming interim CIO, Kleine served as executive director of enrollment operations. His team fielded many requests to upload transcripts, process applications, and so on. However, team members didn’t have an easy system to manage these requests.

“We were getting bombarded with email requests,” he says. “As executive director, it was extremely hard for me to know what was going on with my staff members because I didn’t know the workload that was coming in. That made it impossible to staff correctly. And when folks were on vacation, requests were piling up in their email inboxes.”

Having come from IT, Kleine knew that what employees were doing in his department wasn’t much different than working in an IT support center: Both involved fielding and acting on service requests. Kleine realized his department could use TeamDynamix to manage the routing and fulfillment of its own service requests more effectively.

“It revolutionized the way we did things,” he says. Enrollment operations staff were hesitant to adopt it at first, believing it was just another system they would have to learn. “But when they saw that we were able to turn requests around more quickly and automate key processes,” Kleine says, “they were like, ‘This is the greatest thing ever.’”

Working Smarter

TeamDynamix is the perfect solution to use for enterprise service management across the university, Kleine says. Although it’s a highly flexible and customizable platform, it’s also not overcomplicated. “That allows us to apply it to many areas,” he observes.

With the help of TeamDynamix, Dominican University employees are working smarter with the limited time and resources they have. As a result, they have been able to reduce the amount of time it takes to fulfill service requests and improve the experience for students and faculty.

“First and foremost, we are here for the students,” DeFily says. “We are making sure they have the best possible experience. We’re setting them up to succeed with a comfortable learning and living environment.”