Realising our digital ambitions

Zack Khalifah, 1st Line Support Lead – ICT Service Desk, was tired of their team’s huge staff rota spreadsheet which was taking him and his colleagues 10 hours a week to update! Find out how Zack and his teammates used simple AI, automation tools and innovative ideas to solve their manual input nightmares!

Taking on the challenge

To ensure our ICT Service Desk Analysts availability was accurately reflected each day our team managed a huge Excel rota that we had to manually import into a Microsoft Bookings system. This manual process was necessary so that any free timeslots could be utilised to call back users or for going out into the ‘field’ to do support jobs.

However, since Microsoft Bookings does not provide a built-in option to import schedules from Excel, the process was highly time-consuming, taking approximately 10 hours per week! This ‘old way’ could not go on! My first challenge was to streamline the rota imports, so I developed a Python (programming language) application that automated the process by extracting the rota from Excel and importing it into Microsoft Bookings via Graph Application Programming Interface (API).

What once required hours of manual effort can now be completed in just a few clicks.!

The second challenge was enabling our university community to schedule their own appointments with our analysts while ensuring bookings were properly tracked in our ticketing system. I couldn’t simply share the booking page with users, as their appointments made through Bookings didn’t update their ASK (ServiceNow) tickets. Additionally, I needed a way to ensure that users received the appropriate type of appointment, either a callback or a field support booking, before scheduling the session with an Analyst. Since ASK and Microsoft Bookings are separate systems, I had to find a way to synchronise bookings with ASK to maintain accurate ticket statuses.

Self-taught solutions

I initially discussed the idea with Mylene Cannon, 1st Line Support Manager, suggesting that we could automate the process of updating ASK tickets whenever a customer made a booking using Power Automate.

To develop the solution, I relied heavily on ChatGPT and YouTube tutorials, which were invaluable resources in learning how to implement both Python and Power Automate effectively. My background in Computer Science from university also helped, as even though I hadn’t done much programming since then, I was able to pick things up quickly.

One of the things that works so well at the Service Desk is that Mylene encourages us to explore and implement solutions when we identify ways to improve workflows.

I taught myself Python and Power Automate, and during this time I received great support from the other 1st Line Support Leads; Jeff Wiltshire, Lloyd Pettifer,, and Paul Burkett, who helped by picking up any extra tasks that I wasn’t able to focus on during this time.

I really enjoyed learning both Power Automate and Python, as it allowed me to develop new skills while solving a real-world problem. I found the challenge of troubleshooting particularly rewarding, whenever I got stuck on a formula or script, I’d spend hours experimenting, researching, and problem-solving until I found a solution.

Some of the best moments came when a solution finally clicked, often outside of work hours. There were times when an idea would suddenly come to me in the evening, and I’d jump back on my desk to test it out — only to see it work perfectly! That sense of problem-solving, continuous learning, and seeing my efforts lead to a tangible, time-saving solution made the whole experience incredibly fulfilling.

There were some challenges along the journey, with the biggest being access restrictions and ensuring I had the correct permissions to work with the required systems. Since I was integrating multiple platforms, I needed specific access to ServiceNow, Microsoft Bookings, and Azure.  I didn’t initially have the right permissions, but some of these were easier to get access to than others. Other than this there were a few quirks in the way things work, for example, the bookings link to reschedule appointments required some innovative thinking to access in Power Automate because it’s not directly accessible.

 There were times when an idea would suddenly come to me in the evening, and I’d jump back on my desk to test it out—only to see it work perfectly!

Everyones a winner

You can now schedule and self-serve your appointments with the ICT Service Desk. This is great for us because it frees up our analysts’ time to work on your issues rather than doing admin.

I am very proud that my new system has been adopted, so if you are currently requesting support from the Service Desk team and you require a callback or field support you are already benefitting from the new system.