When a person or department orders a paid service from ITS, such as a telephone or wireless access point, the ITS Service Fulfillment team is responsible for coordinating the fulfillment of the service request. The small but mighty team helps ensure ITS service offerings are delivered in a timely manner and meet customers' needs. Fittingly, the team most enjoys working with customers to establish and maintain excellent relationships and dreams of moving all their work into a single system to further improve the customer experience.

What is your team name?

Service Fulfillment

What is your team's role within ITS?

Service Fulfillment is a component of the broader supply chain process. We utilize a hybrid model in fulfilling service requests for most ITS billable services. The delivery of each IT service varies depending on the service requested. Service delivery is handled internally by ITS, externally by third-party vendors or a combination of both. Service Fulfillment is integral in ensuring IT services are ordered, provisioned and billed.

Who makes up the team and what role do they perform?

The team is comprised of an IT manager and five IT service coordinator positions: Lisa Martin-Brown (manager) Anai Sims, Kerri Pigott, Shantas Nixon and two vacant positions. One customer service representative position is also vacant.

The coordinators are responsible for managing client relationships, collecting and processing information to internal and external service providers and ensuring IT service offerings meet the individual needs of customers.

The customer service representative is responsible for administrative activities such as report-generated customer communications, first responder duties, converting cases to Technology Service Requests and Repair Requests and managing data entry.

What are your team's current projects?

The largest projects we are following include the construction of the new Legacy Hall building and the new Interdisciplinary Research & Commercialization building and the VoIP conversion of the Frank Shaw building. On average, each coordinator works 90-120 service requests simultaneously, the majority of which have a lifecycle that is typically greater than 30 business days. Due to staffing challenges, each coordinator is currently averaging 146 service requests.

What is the most rewarding project this year?

The new student union and the Ringling VoIP conversion projects required an all-hands-on-deck approach to ensure project resources were requested and activities to meet project milestones were completed.

What is your favorite part of working in ITS?

For us, it is the people with whom we interact. Our customer base is always the same, so it is important to establish and maintain great relationships. We view our customers as mutual alliances; as ITS grows, so does the partnership.

What is the biggest challenge your team is facing?

Tools. We are currently co-sponsors on a project with departmental leadership to identify a ticketing system that simplifies requesting ITS services. Service Fulfillment works in multiple systems—Salesforce and FileMaker—to support the university community's technological needs. We rely heavily on email and manual processes to manage service requests, which makes employee responsibilities more tedious. These manual responsibilities contribute to employee burnout and high employee turnover rates.

If your team was to invent one piece of technology as a team, what would it be?

The technology already exists. So we guess a money tree so we can make enough money to fund our migration to Salesforce. Having all customer relationship management systems, both for the user and back-end processes, use the same platform opens up a great deal of positive opportunities. ITS would be able to streamline service offerings, the service portfolio and statistics.

In five years, what do you see your team working on?

We would like a complete restructuring of the business unit to recognize the coordinators as business analysts.

In our business, the customers return because their responsibilities are role-based, such as IT professionals and budget managers. Once we automate as much of the workflow as possible, we would like to implement annual meetings to review current billable services with our customers, document their short-term and long-term needs and propose possible solutions. We have some experience with this in the past with the Athletics Department, Office of the General Counsel, College of Communication & Information and Department of Psychology. However, due to staff shortages and a lack of departmental sponsorship, we could not sustain the process under our current organizational structure.

The user experience is very important to us. The submission of every service request is an opportunity to make the necessary improvements or adjustments in real-time.