ITSM Public Sector Case Study: Newham Partnership Working

Newham Partnership Working (NPW) is a mutual organisation created to run and commission services to its school members and beyond. Formed in July 2012, NPW took over the running of four key services from the London Borough of Newham – Education ICT, Schools HR, Governor Services and School Support Services, held in high regard by Newham Schools.

The Education ICT Team has over 17 years’ experience and provides advice and technical support for Schools, for curriculum and administration IT, networks and staff. Its aim is to provide high quality ICT support services to all 90 subscribing schools and it has recently invested in Sunrise’s ITSM(IT Service Management) solution to manage its support services.

The ICT team supports a wide range of end users in 66 primary schools, 7 nurseries and children’s centres, 2 special schools and 15 secondary schools. Users are headteachers school business managers, teachers and teaching assistants, the end users all have very different levels of expertise and use a variety of systems.

Clare Watson, Service Delivery Manager at Newham Partnership Working explained; “Increasingly technology is an essential part of the educational environment and we recognise that advice and support are a vital part of the service that we provide to our schools. One of the key drivers for us choosing Sostenuto was that it enabled us to provide an easier way for our users to log calls as well as for us to manage our service delivery more efficiently.”

To discover how NPW have used Sunrise to help them to manage a more efficient service delivery to their internal customer please take a look at their case study below:

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Newham Partnership Working (NPW) is a mutual organisation created to run and commission services to its school members and beyond. Formed in July 2012, NPWtook over the running of four key services from the London Borough of Newham – Education ICT, Schools HR, Governor Services and School Support Services, held in high regard by Newham Schools. The Education ICT Team has over 17 years’ experience and provides advice and technical
support for Schools, for curriculum and administration IT, networks and staff. Its aim is to provide high quality ICT support services to all 90 subscribing schools and it has recently invested in Sostenuto ITSM (IT Service Management) from Sunrise Software to manage its support services.

ICT crucial element of education
The Newham schools are high users of ICT in the classroom enhanced by a Local Authority PFI project with RM plc. As well as desktops, printers, interactive whiteboards and other technology installed across the Borough. The PFI Project gave year 5 and 6 pupils in 30 Newham schools a laptop for classroom and home learning. More
recently many of the schools are starting to implement iPads and other mobile devices for teaching and learning.

The ICT team supports a wide range of end users in 66 primary schools, 7 nurseries and children’s centres, 2 special schools and 15 secondary schools. Users are headteachers, school business managers, teachers and teaching assistants, so the end users all have very different levels of expertise and use a variety of systems. Clare Watson, Service Delivery Manager at Newham Partnership Working explained; “Increasingly technology is an essential part of the educational environment and we recognise that advice and support are a vital part of the service that we provide to our schools. One of the key drivers for us choosing Sostenuto was that it enabled us to provide an easier way for our users to log calls as well as for us to manage our service delivery more efficiently.”
Streamlining user requests efficiently Clare’s team wanted a transparent system that enabled all IT users to log and track calls quickly and easily. Using Sostenuto ITSM, all requests are logged centrally by end users online via the
school’s learning platform and then redistributed to technicians assigned to the schools. Rules built into the Sostenuto system ensure that this happens seamlessly. In total there are 27 technicians who are based at different schools
from one to up to five days a week, dependant on the school’s requirements.

Starting with ten pilot schools, NPW rolled out the new system in four phases over a period of twelve months. The new process makes it much easier for the technicians to plan their work and also ensures that requests do not get missed. Previously a post-it note or request mentioned in the corridor may not have been logged and then
forgotten about. Now this isn’t possible. Another benefit of using one Service Desk system across the schools has been the fact that if a teacher moves to another school, they are familiar with the system.
Success supported by early buy-in from users
A key part of the success of the project has been gaining buy-in from the users from the start. This was achieved by working with the schools’ ICT Coordinators to agree the Service Level Agreements and identify the request categories
and what should be considered a priority – for example, a whiteboard not working is considered a high priority.
Quantifiable business benefits
For NPW using Sostenuto has also delivered efficiency benefits for the ICT team. In the same way that the Training department can quantify exactly what training courses have been delivered and associated costs to schools, the new Service Level Agreements have enabled the ICT desk to provide details of services delivered to individual schools over a set period, covering requests handled, fixes and technician time.
“We can now generate a report at the end of the term for schools showing what has been achieved. We can justify our costs by showing exactly what they are getting for their money, which we just couldn’t do before,” explains Clare.
Thanks to Sostenuto’s powerful reporting, the support team is also able to look at the report and advise headteachers on equipment refreshes. For example, a high number of calls logged about interactive whiteboards may indicate that the equipment needs upgrading. “One headteacher said that they thought they needed to extend the number of days that the technician attends school. Checking the call volumes and jobs that the technician couldn’t complete we were able to identify what the problem and solution might be – do they need to replace kit, or are there a lot of incidents being reported by one member of staff which might mean there is a training requirement that they need to address,” said Clare. Going mobile NPW has recently invested in Sostenuto Mobile, which technicians who are making on-site visits to schools can access on their corporate iPhones. This enables them to check prior to visiting a
school what incidents they will be dealing with before they arrive on site. The ICT team plans to roll this out to teachers, enabling them to log calls with their own mobile devices, rather than having to find a computer in school.
Clare attributes the success of the project to working with the end users from the early stages; “It comes down to the engagement that we had with our users at the beginning and explaining how the system was going to work, so
that they were ready to meet the challenges of implementing new technology and new ways of working.”