The education sector is experiencing breakthroughs, but these are accompanied by IT challenges that pose significant roadblocks. Nottingham College was in a challenging situation, having ordeals in almost every department.
This case study elucidates how the college successfully crossed its IT management hurdles and secured its win.
"ManageEngine came as a godsend when we started to talk about our challenges and how we can handle them."
—Yasir Rafi
Head of IT services, Nottingham College
Nottingham College
About Nottingham College
Nottingham College is one of the largest colleges specialising in further education in the UK. With 10 campuses across Nottingham, the college serves upwards of 40,000 students and stands as a centre of excellence for them. It offers a broad spectrum of courses catering to students of all ages and preparing them for the workplace.
Yasir Rafi
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Business challenges
Like every other institute, Nottingham College faced several difficulties in meeting the requirements of the rapidly evolving technological landscape. One such barrier that it had to overcome was its budget. Additionally, with IT facilitating the college's daily operations, it had to ensure that all the services were running smoothly without impacting other teams or causing downtime.
Needless to say, it needed a reliable solution that could enable seamless operations across departments while keeping its systems and data secure and staying within its budget.
What was once a headache is now a piece of cake
Nottingham College had a raft of devices spread across its sites to meet users' needs. Managing those assets, especially when onboarding and offboarding users, was a hard task. This beset the service desk team, prompting it to look for solutions that could streamline the asset management process. First, it researched all the available vendors in the ITSM space. Yet how did it land on ManageEngine?
Jo Willis, IT customer service team leader at Nottingham College, has an answer:
"We selected ManageEngine because they have a hybrid setup. They have on-premises and cloud, and it's so easy to use for the users and for our team members to log tickets or to run reports of the areas that the tool has to offer. It's very seamless and easy to use."
—Jo Willis
With the implementation, Nottingham College knocked down the first barrier, which was asset management and tracking. How was this accomplished?
Delving deeper, ServiceDesk Plus has a self-scan application that discovers all the assets available within the IT environment, consolidates them on a single dashboard, and uploads the hardware and software details, eliminating manual effort and offering comprehensive visibility. This made it easy for the service delivery team to keep track of devices when a person joins or leaves the college. Now, a whopping 11,000 assets are managed entirely through the asset management module.
"The asset management, as before, was a bit of a mess. It's all in one place now. It's really good."
—Jeremy Morley
In addition, the ITIL®-compliant solution generates inventory reports that provide insights such as the machine number, last logon, and time taken to fix issues, making it easy to demonstrate compliance to the audit team. The IT admins, who were once swamped with service request calls and emails from users, now enjoy the convenience the tool has brought into their lives.
The customisable templates within ServiceDesk Plus collect all the required information from the users when logging tickets, thus avoiding back-and-forth and elevating the end-user experience. These tickets then get automatically triaged and assigned to the technicians with the help of rules set up in the tool. This enables the IT team to take action on the tickets, reducing the risk of oversight and delays.
Nottingham College did see a few more tangible outcomes. The built-in user satisfaction surveys empowered the users to give feedback to the teams, keeping them informed of the quality of the services offered. In a recent survey, user satisfaction soared from 50% to 85%. The graph allowed the IT team to track tickets monthly, analyse trends, and better understand its bottlenecks.
The IT team lauded ServiceDesk Plus' scalability and the support the team received from the account managers, who are always available to help resolve issues quickly. The other departments within the college have also been pleased with the service and are actively looking to move to ServiceDesk Plus.
User account creation without human intervention
One thing that consumed much of the IT admins' time was user account creation. Taking about five to 10 minutes for each user, this task had to be scaled to over 8,000 new students each year. The IT team desperately set out on a hunt for a vendor that could simplify the process.
Nottingham College ramped up its relationship with ManageEngine and lined up a few more products, including ADManager Plus. The IT admins were incredibly impressed with its automation capabilities (such as setting up user accounts) and the countless time savings it offered. Furthermore, the tool took out the human element, making it error-free and highly secure—thus creating a paradigm shift. The staff now completely trusts ADManager Plus, which takes care of the rest of user account creation and report generation!
"ADManager Plus is a great product. We could have 8,000 plus students joining us every year, and it's amazing how effectively and efficiently the solution creates the accounts for us seamlessly without having any human intervention. It is so secure and seamless. It just works."
—Yasir Rafi
In addition to these benefits, retrieving data from ADManager Plus is effortless. It provides reports quickly so the admins can zero in on other business-critical tasks. Gone are the days of running custom scripts to perform any specific operation. The solution runs all of that in a report at the click of a button.
Patching is no longer daunting
If managing assets was one significant challenge, securing them felt even more complex and convoluted. Worst of all, patching them one by one manually ate up a substantial amount of the technicians' time. So, how did the institute address this issue and fortify its security?
It reached out to ManageEngine and identified Patch Manager Plus as the perfect fit. The solution's automatic patching capability became the lynchpin in Nottingham College's security game, decidedly saving significant time and manual effort. The tool flags any issues well in advance, thus enabling the security team to work on them proactively and take preventive measures.
Patch Manager Plus integrated with in-house and third-party applications to offer an overarching view of the IT environment. The staff members at the college loved the exceptional support they received from evaluation to implementation and have started seeing real value after onboarding ManageEngine solutions. Encouraged by these results, Nottingham College is now evaluating Analytics Plus and would confidently recommend ManageEngine to anyone.
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About ManageEngine
ManageEngine is a division of Zoho Corporation, and a leading provider of IT management solutions for organizations across the world. With a powerful, flexible, and AI-powered digital enterprise management platform, we help businesses get their work done from anywhere and everywhere—better, safer, and faster. To learn more, visit www.manageengine.com.
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