Realising our digital ambitions

ICT Service Desk 1st Line Support Leads, Jeff Wiltshire and Paul Burkett, are not just the friendly voice at the end of the phone when you have an IT issue. They are leading the way in customer support and are always looking to make your experience better with efficiency savings and innovative solutions.

At a recent show and tell session to ICT colleagues, Paul and Jeff demonstrated a great solution for not only saving our staff time, but improving response rates and service satisfaction for staff and students using Audio Visual (AV) equipment in lecture theatres and campus computers.

Jeff said, “Our goals were to free up our analysts’ time, improve the overall efficiency of the Service Desk and staff satisfaction, and to ensure that campus computer rooms and lecture theatres were consistently ready for use”.

A cluster of activity

Part of an analyst’s role is to check the status of student (cluster) machines on campus and ensure the AV systems are always operational in lecture theatres.

The challenge with this work is that it can be very time-consuming, using an inefficient process of manually checking the current platform on a daily basis for issues with cluster computers and then logging hundreds of identified faults in our ticketing system.

For the AV checks, our analysts had to manually review a daily checks Excel file and create tickets for the 120+ rooms each day.

Jeff explained, “This manual element of the process significantly impacted productivity, requiring one analyst to dedicate half a day just for checking and logging faults! The process also made accurate reporting difficult and delayed issue resolution, as many problems could not be fixed remotely.”

From tedious tasks to seamless solutions

To address the issue, Paul and Jeff spoke with stakeholders to understand the specific challenges and requirements. The team physically checked all cluster rooms to ensure that the information in the current system matched what was found in the rooms.

They then went on to develop an internal application called the ‘Campus cluster checks analyser’,  using Microsoft’s Visual Studio (VB.NET) and WMI queries to automate the remote checking of cluster computer machines and a questionnaire for the AV rooms. This tool was designed to verify the availability and functionality of computers without manual intervention.

Additionally, Jeff implemented a feature that automatically logs tickets in ASK for any identified issues, eliminating the need for analysts to manually create them.

The tool was tested successfully in the development environments of the room and timetabling system, CELCAT, before preparing it for live deployment.

To fully optimise the process, the team requested read-only API access to CELCAT’s live Production environment (PROD). This enabled Jeff real-time retrieval of room availability data, ensuring minimal impact on the live timetabling system.

Our objective is to access CELCAT to obtain the latest exam schedule and publish it in Power BI. Currently, the Examination Timetabling Team manually downloads and shares the exam schedule with us, and any changes are not automatically flagged. This requires us to manually compare the old and new Excel files to identify changes. Additionally, we spend a considerable amount of time checking CELCAT for room availability before conducting visits. Having this data in Power BI would allow us to generate reports that provide the necessary information, making the process of preparing cluster rooms for exams quicker and easier in future.

 

A sense of achievement

Jeff said, “The best part of working on this solution was seeing the immediate impact of automation on analyst productivity and service efficiency. By eliminating repetitive administrative tasks, analysts could focus on resolving issues rather than logging them, improving overall service quality.

“I enjoyed the collaboration with stakeholders, and the opportunity to develop a custom tool tailored to the Service Desk’s needs was highly rewarding. Successfully testing the tool in the Celcat DEV environment and preparing it for live deployment provided a sense of achievement, knowing it would directly improve staff satisfaction and user experience.” Jeff Wiltshire

Up to the challenge

One of the biggest challenges the team faced was the amount of time required to manually check the current system and log tickets, which initially made it difficult to allocate time for developing the automation tool.

Ensuring that the tool could accurately detect issues remotely and log tickets correctly in ASK required extensive testing and debugging.

Another challenge was obtaining API access to the CELCAT production environment, as this required co-ordination with external teams, compliance with data access policies, and ensuring the integration had minimal impact on the production environment.

Zeroing in on success

Jeff and Paul are proud of impact they have had and the overall outcome has been a significant reduction in manual workload for their analysts, improving efficiency and response times.

Jeff suggests they have realised their goals as the automation tool now:

• saves analysts half a day checking and logging tickets.
• automatically logs issues in ASK, reducing ticket creation time to zero.
• improves reporting accuracy, as faults are logged consistently without human error.
• frees up analysts’ time to focus on higher-value tasks, rather than repetitive administrative work.
• enhances service efficiency and user experience by ensuring AV rooms and cluster machines are ready for use.

Ongoing improvements

The Service Desk team will continue to innovate and work with other members of ICT, like the Tooling Team, to create solutions to further optimise the booking process for exam room cluster checks. This will ensure faster response times, more accurate bookings, and an overall more efficient Service Desk!

“I am incredibly proud of our team for balancing the demands of our daily operations while driving meaningful improvements for our customers. Their dedication to automating our mundane processes not only improves our customer service but also creates space for more engaging and impactful work. I cannot commend them enough for their commitment, innovation, and teamwork, which make a real difference!” Okan Kibaroglu, Director of Customer Success

Read Unlocking efficiency with automated solutions: ICT Service Desk are leading the way in full

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!

Everyone’s 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. The below video shows you how to use the new form to book a callback with an Analyst.

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.

Read From spreadsheet fatigue to automated awesomeness: A Journey in ICT Service Desk innovation in full