© University of Reading 2008 www.reading.ac.uk

IT Services

10 April 2023

Remedy for IT Support StaffIT Supporters – 14 Jan 2008

History

• Additional Support for IT Support Staff– lunchtime event 15 May 2007

• https://www.reading.ac.uk/nmsruntime/saveasdialog.asp?lID=14486&sID=63947

• conclusion: Remedy will be trialled with a few schools so that best modes of working can be identified

• Remedy demonstration– lunchtime event 12 June 2007

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Remedy Trial

• When?– started towards end of autumn term

• Who?– School of Law– School of Biological Sciences– Department of Real Estate & Planning

– School of Chemistry, Food Biosciences & Pharmacy– Department of Mathematics

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Remedy teams and“functional accounts”

• Teams control who tickets can be assigned to– you can assign tickets to:

• others in your team• the functional accounts

• Functional accounts– allow tickets to be assigned to different areas in ITS,

e.g. • ITS Help• Distributed Support• Systems & Communications

– have “*” at beginning of name• e.g. “*ITS Help Service”

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Teams and functional accounts

• Schools in trial have:– a special functional account

• starting with “~”– a team

• containing all staff involved in trial in that school

• e.g. for SBS:– functional account:

• ~sbs-itsupport– team:

• SBS– SBS staff can assign tickets to each other and to main

functional accounts– SBS staff cannot assign tickets to IT staff in other schools

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Email into Remedy

• We have provided an email address for IT support calls:– school-itsupport@reading.ac.uk– e.g. sbs-itsupport@reading.ac.uk

• Email sent to this address triggers:– automatic conversion of email into a ticket– automatic response to sender

• giving ticket number– automatic assigning of ticket to ~sbs-itsupport

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Email from Remedy

• when email is sent to sbs-itsupport@reading.ac.uk– email goes to the functional account– ITS can set up forwarding to any email address within

SBS• to alert staff to incoming ticket

• when ticket is assigned to ~sbs-itsupport by ITS– email goes to the functional account (as above)– email goes to user to say that ticket is no longer with

ITS

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Email from Remedy

• can email user from within Remedy– can choose whether this comes from:

• person owning ticket (ticket assignee)• school-itsupport@reading.ac.uk

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ITS Help

• tickets raised by ITS Help can be passed to IT support staff in schools

• if user calls ITS Help to query progress:– ITS Help can see ticket is with school– ITS Help will inform user that ticket is with school– ITS Help may suggest user contacts school IT staff– ITS Help may update ticket so that school staff are

aware of call– ITS Help may call school IT staff

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Flagging IT support staff

• IT support staff flagged in Remedy

• “** IT Supporter **” pops up alongside status field

• HR have provided a list of staff likely to be IT support staff– need to update Remedy list– need to maintain list

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“Supported by” info in Remedy

• ITS have been using this to indicate which functional account provides support to particular groups of users

• can indicate that support only given to users with particular status– e.g. can indicate that support is given to staff & PGRs

but not UGs

• to do:– update for school IT support staff– update when new username format comes in

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Feedback

• good to receive tickets from ITS when problems are reported to ITS

• good record of outstanding tasks

• useful audit log

• better routes in to ITS?

• feel part of a larger organisation

• better way to organise work

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Feedback

• getting used to system– time logging details– email generated from Remedy– simultaneous updates by more than one person– reminders of outstanding tickets

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Next stages

• further testing by those on trial

• determine if any major issues

• further feedback to IT support staff

• feedback to AGITS

• roll out further

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Questions

• How would you use Remedy in your school?– recording tasks– level of logging– ease of re-assigning tickets

• within team• between you & ITS

– ITS can pass tickets to school IT staff

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