RMS Services • Market leaders in resource management solutions throughout Europe • Thornbury, Bristol

The University of the West of England (UWE), based in Bristol, has a population of 30,000 students, 1,500 academic staff and 1,500 support staff in 9 Faculties spread over 4 campuses and 5,000 network devices. It is supported by centralised IT services with 90 staff.

Due to the increasing cost of desktop support and the proliferation of its server infrastructure, IT Services moved away from the traditional academic/administrative model of computing to adopt a very aggressive commercial IT model through centralisation of both IT provision and budgetary control. This enabled IT Services to focus on delivering corporate services whilst enabling Faculty support staff to focus on specialist, Faculty specific IT delivery.

In 1999, IT Services had two support systems in place, a help desk system for fault calls and an in-house developed database for recording work requests. The help desk system provided no direct access to the necessary service management information regarding the nature, progress and overall impact of help desk calls on the service.

Morale of help desk staff was very low and the lack of a formal, integrated change management system made workload planning extremely difficult, with paperwork being passed between teams to allocate and schedule work. This situation and the processes used within IT Services meant that the service to staff and students was variable.