By: Steven Smeall
Information Institutional Research Technology Services has changed the way Algonquin students and faculty will report tech problems.
The goal, officials say, is to solve problems more quickly and efficiently.
Prior to this update, any students or faculty that experienced problems with anything tech related would have to report the problems through emails which would sometimes result in unsolved issues. Students and faculty will now fill out an ‘incident’ report online and will inform IIRTS when the problem is actually solved.
The new process will allow IIRTS to track information related to any problems brought to them.
“If we got feedback, it probably wasn’t tracked as well as it could’ve been, and if we are going to continuously improve our service to students and staff then we need to know what it is that we have to do,” said IIRTS project manager Cindy Chapman.
“We will meet with (the clients). We will find out what the issues are and identify a new process or fix the old one,” said Chapman.
Clients will also now be allowed to give feedback on the incident resolution process when the incident is fixed, which will help the IIRTS prevent further problems and help find ways to assist clients better with every new incident.
The IIRTS had already seen the new incident resolution process used for 10 incidents as of Feb. 1. Eight of which were solved within the week.
At the time the new process was at an 80 per cent satisfaction rate, showing positive results for the resolution process very early on. As this incident report process is brand new, problems were expected to occur.
“For the next four weeks we’re meeting every week to see what the issues (with the resolution process) are and a couple of things have come up, but they’re not showstoppers. These problems were unknowns, so we could not have predicted them,” said Chapman.
As the process is still in its very early stages, official statistics on how the process is doing were not available apart from the first-week report.
“We are in the process of creating an issue log which will help us resolve problems very quickly,” said Chapman.
The IIRTS hopes that this new process will help reduce inconsistencies as well as lead them to a higher efficiency rate and higher support standards.
For students or faculty wanting to know how to use this new resolution process for any problems they may have, the IIRTS has a tutorial on how to fill out an incident report posted on their Youtube page.