National Ice Centre plays a winning game with ServiceDesk Plus

The National Ice Centre (NIC) complex is the UK’s first facility with twin Olympic size ice rinks. It is home to Ice Locker, the UK’s biggest ice sports store and one of the most successful ice hockey teams in the country, the GMB Nottingham Panthers.

Nottingham’s long tradition of ice skating began in 1895 with skating on the frozen River Trent and saw Nottingham’s most famous couple, Jane Torvill and Christopher Dean, dominating the World and Olympic Championships in the 1980s. Continuing this tradition, the centre hosts a successful skating academy and is the training ground for the GB Short Track Speed Skating Squad. Located just east of Nottingham city centre, the NIC was officially opened on 1 April 2000 by Olympic Gold Medalist, Jayne Torvill.

IT challenges for the service desk

The NIC’s ten-member IT team is classified into Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 support, along with data analysts and developers. Based out of Nottingham, the team supports more than 500 staff in the UK across cities such as London, Glasgow and Liverpool. The end user base includes office staff, support staff, contact centres, retail outlets, cafes, bars and restaurants, merchandise teams, operational teams, as well as production teams for concerts and events.

Before ServiceDesk Plus, the NIC used Spiceworks for its help desk operations. IT manager Tom Peach-Geraghty says that, prior to using ServiceDesk Plus, tracking and managing tickets without proper categorisation was difficult. The team also needed a way to put tickets on hold and automatically open them at predefined intervals. The fact that the ticket assignment process was manual and the organisation could not apply predefined ticket routing logic to assign tickets to technicians or support groups automatically was also a challenge.

“Managing our support tickets without proper categorisation and routing was really difficult,” said Peach-Geraghty. “We had to implement a lot of workarounds and procedural changes to make it work.”

The lack of an effective mobile app for the help desk also affected the team's efficiency because the technicians were not able to respond to tickets on the fly. To meet these challenges, the team wanted a help desk tool that would integrate with the company's existing ITIL functionality and help achieve total ITIL adoption.

Smart solution for day-to-day IT management

The NIC opted for ServiceDesk Plus, a help desk software tool from ManageEngine built on the ITIL framework with integrated asset and project management. Listed in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for ITSSM tools, it is available in 29 different languages and used by more than 100,000 companies, across 186 countries, to manage their IT help desk and assets.

Having deployed ServiceDesk Plus, the IT team at The National Ice Centre saw immediate results. Using the business rules feature, they can now classify, categorise, group and prioritise incoming tickets based on preset rules. The technician auto-assign feature also helps assign tickets based on a technician's workload, which in turn balances out the work.

ServiceDesk Plus enables an unlimited number of technicians to track unlimited users and tickets, even across multiple sites. As a result, the team has better control of ticket statuses with the configurations available. For example, when a technician has to await a response from the end user, the tool automatically switches the ticket status from open to on-hold and stops the SLA timer. This improves compliance levels and reduces manual intervention.

Technicians are also able to create and schedule preventive maintenance tasks at regular intervals for repetitive tasks, thereby reducing the number of incoming maintenance calls to the help desk.

Peach-Geraghty and his team also use the ServiceDesk Plus iOS and Android browser-based web apps to manage the help desk from their pockets, enabling them to access tickets from any location.
Speaking about the mobility that ServiceDesk Plus has brought, he said: “Technicians are loving the mobile app. Due to the way our business works, they spend a lot of time out of their desks. To be able to manage their tickets and get push notifications when roaming around is fantastic.”

The ServiceDesk Plus tool ensures that only qualified technicians were allowed to work on critical tickets as the technicians have to submit the solutions for approval before working on them. The fact that the IT team is able to import its existing solution articles into ServiceDesk Plus ensures seamless transfer to the repository. The knowledge base serves as a ready reference for technicians, reduces turnaround times, helps end users solve simple issues on their own and reduces the number of calls to the support desk.

“We're really enjoying using ServiceDesk Plus,” confirmed Peach-Geraghty. “It really helps us nail our ITIL processes down harder and enables far more accurate reporting. The technicians get a lot more out of it compared with our old help desk. Although we were working very hard on our ITIL adoption, it was only after integrating ServiceDesk Plus with our IT service portfolio tools, KEDB (known error database) and CMDB (configuration management database), that we saw ourselves going a notch up when it came to maturing our help desk process.”