Warrington Borough Council extends service support platform beyond IT with Sunrise Systems

The Council were pretty clear about what they were looking to achieve; it needed to be web based; to include Self-service; it needed to underpin their entire internal support requirements; and it needed to be extendible - building over time to meet their list of short, medium and longer term functional requirements.
“We chose the Sunrise Service Desk solution from a shortlist of two companies.” Explains Sue Keating, Service Performance Lead at Warrington Borough Council. “For us they were the clear choice. The system has a broad range of features and functions and it was the most cost effective answer to our needs.”

A Service Desk that spans the organisation
Within budget and with a specification list that ticked all the boxes, Warrington began the roll-out of the Sunrise Service Desk software in February 2010. Used for Incident, Problem, the platform has been rolled out across the Council. As well as IT support the system is also used by several different Service Desk teams providing support for the Council’s Social Care, HR and SAP systems. The Self-service feature within Sunrise enables any council employee with access to the network to log their own requests for help via the intranet and online portal.

“We’ve extended the Sunrise platform beyond IT to cover multiple Service Desks providing support for a variety of areas,” adds Sue. “The system’s user roles and security functions have meant that we can partition specific department Incidents for the Social Care and HR systems from IT Incidents with ease. This has enabled us to achieve additional value from the software, ensuring a good Return on Investment.”

The system has been extended to underpin the independent Service Desk functions in the HR and Social Care Systems departments. “They all share a single database,” says Sue, “but Sunrise allows us to direct issues to the right people to resolve them. Very few people get access to ALL the Incidents across the Council. That’s mainly for the IT department and for management reporting.”

Self-service saves time and increases transparency
The browser based Self-service feature within the Sunrise Service Desk is available to any IT user within the Council. A key capability for Warrington, its implementation has been beneficial in a number of ways. With Council staff now able to log their own calls and requests for help online quickly and with ease, the service teams have more time to concentrate on resolving issues and providing a good service because they are spending less time on the phone.

“Initially, the number of logged incidents increased,” explains Sue. “We found that by giving staff the ability to log their own issue, they were more inclined to let us know about problems that they had previously tried to ignore or work around until they became critical.” This in itself is beneficial as Incidents can be resolved before they become issues that are affecting productivity.

The rise in number of Incidents logged due to the introduction of Self-service has also been instrumental in helping the service teams to get a clearer picture of what’s really going on across the organisation.

Powerful Reporting
The powerful reporting capabilities within the system enable the Service Desk team to take a more holistic view of services provided including identifying trends and problem areas that warrant further investigation. Once a problem has been identified, the Problem Management features ensure that the appropriate support or development teams get a full picture of the situation. This provides valuable information, which helps to identify the root of the issue and resolve it. “It is not unusual to see a single problem be the cause of multiple incidents, which present themselves in slightly different ways, so being able to analyse that data to identify trends is extremely valuable,” says Sue.

Most recently, the Council has taken advantage of installing Sunrise’s Wallboard reporting solution; a configurable graphical dashboard. This will not only give the team a dynamic picture of the open incidents and their performance against SLAs but will also enhance management reports. Sue and her team appreciate this visibility. “This will really help us to stay on target,” she says. “And will ensure that we focus on the right things in the right order.”

Supplier and service contract details at a glance
In addition to Incident, Problem, monitoring SLAs and enabling Self-service, the Sunrise platform also holds key service and support information. With many 3rd party supplier service contracts in place to support the wide range of systems used across the Council, this is an important tool for the service teams. Having this information to hand enables them to identify the terms of the support contract, types and volumes of licensing in place, SLAs and numbers to call for over 140 active contracts at a glance.

Centralised asset tracking
Core to their service offering is the control and management of IT hardware. With Sunrise, Warrington have logged and tracked their hardware assets across the Council. This enables them to track warranties and assess any issues related to the age and condition of hardware. It also means that the team can recover hardware from employees as they leave the business.

Benefits beyond IT
For Sue and her team, there are many clear, quantifiable benefits as a result of implementing Sunrise, but ultimately it comes down to two things; they are to manage their workload to allow them to meet their service level agreements and their internal customers are happy with the support they receive.

“We have better management information, our time is spent more effectively and, when we begin to use the Wallboard, the teams feel that they will have a better understanding of the issues at hand at any one time.” She says. “But what really makes us sit up and take notice is the responses we get from our regular customer satisfaction surveys. In the year to date so far we are scoring over 90%, which we are pleased with.”