About Northwestern Counseling and Support Services (NCSS): NCSS is a private human services agency based out of Vermont. As a nonprofit, NCSS delivers various health and community services to the people of Franklin and Grand Isle counties. The IT team at NCSS is comprised of three technicians who support about 850 end users scattered across 17 locations. Altogether, their IT department also manages more than 1,000 IT assets spread across their infrastructure.
Like any other IT department, the IT team at NCSS wanted to move beyond firefighting and focus on improving IT service availability for their end users. This meant cutting down on the unproductive and repetitive L1 incidents that were a drain to the team's productivity. The team, led by IT manager Randy Connelly, achieved this by populating their knowledge base in ServiceDesk Plus with workarounds and solutions for minor and trivial issues, and publishing them to end users on the self-service portal. This helps end users at NCSS resolve these incidents themselves, ultimately bringing down the number of L1 incidents and trivial requests being logged into NCSS's IT help desk system.
With the L1 tickets taken care of, Connelly and his team then streamlined various IT management processes, including Active Directory (AD) management and network management. The ADSelfService Plus integration with ServiceDesk Plus now enables end users at NCSS to reset their AD passwords and unlock their accounts from the IT self-service portal, saving the IT team from hundreds of password reset requests. "We can't wait to integrate with ADManager Plus so that we can further automate user-onboarding and better audit our AD environment," says Connelly.
The team also ensures minimal service disruptions by staying on top of every network alarm or issue through the integration with OpManager, ManageEngine's network management solution. This integration automatically converts network alarms from OpManager into ServiceDesk Plus tickets, with all parameters like category, priority, and impact already set by the time they reach the help desk. These tickets are also automatically routed to the right technicians or support groups that help them diagnose issues and fix them with minimal business impact.
"It's a product that seems to have been written by a bunch of IT technicians. All the features create efficiencies to our work day that saves us a lot of money," concludes Connelly, as he sums up his team's experience with ServiceDesk Plus.