University Office Administration Request System

Business Focus - University - Administrative Services

Universities normally operate with a set of office administrators to handle varied daily operations requests. Many times, these requests are managed within email. Often, the data in the emails is transferred to spreadsheets for general tracking. Using this approach, the data is subject to change frequently as request needs change and verifications are needed. The result is often the incorrect or late fulfillment of requests.

This customer desired to implement a centralized request tracking system. All requests needed to be entered from a single navigation point. All requests needed to be categorized and routed to the correct operations handler. All requests needed to be protected from the view of many others based on personal information being entered. And requests needed to be accessible for overall operations metrics reporting. This created an opportunity for the customer to explore Workfront as a detailed request management platform.

Challenge

This implementation team’s primary challenge was moving the university’s requesters to a common entry point for their requests. This required the customer to define a services catalog, which represents the request types they performed. This required the customer to agree on the data to capture and maintain. And this required that the request management practice be planned in a pilot and general roll-out to the university’s requesters, like teachers, students, and leaders.

Two major obstacles occurred during their implementation. One was a significant change in organizational reporting structure that shifted and consolidated processing within the office administration’s groups. This resulted in a significant pause in the implementation project while decisions were made for who reported to whom and who was going to do what. The other was COVID-19, where the entire university moved to remote, which was an unfamiliar working situation for the entire core team.

Solution

Service Catalog

The Workfront platform was configured to accommodate the many request types defined by the service catalog results. The service catalog is a DevOps / Help Desk approach for determining the data categorization and data tracking needs associated to requests. In the exercise, the administrators first make choices on how to categorize the requests they support. Then, they explore the data they need to keep track of, either for fulfilling the requests or providing metrics reporting later. These results are then analyzed to determine how the request queues should be structured for ownership, initial assignment, and security settings. It is common for consolidations to occur as the services show significant overlap in either function or purpose

Workfront - Queue Management

The Workfront platform was configured to accommodate the many requests associated with the administrators. Custom forms were created to match the service catalog request types. Some custom forms were configured to allow more than one request or combination requests to be tracked in one form. Routing rules and queue topics were used to allow for the automated movement of requests to specific handling buckets. These buckets (as projects separate from the request queues) were used to drive interactions with the administrators. Several reports and dashboards were set up to enable an implied workflow for the administrators. These included new items, items in work, recently completed items, and search. Other reports and dashboards were used to help the overall leaders to look across request types for metrics.

Organizational Change Management

The customer was helped greatly by using organizational change practices and themes. The two implementation obstacles were significant in pausing the project. The implementation reset for the organizational change was helped by being able to describe the current state, future state, and mapping between. Using this approach, the customer was able to quickly rework the custom forms and queues for request types that were moving to another department. The COVID-19 experience was overcome by getting used to being remote and leveraging Workfront as a natural remote workforce enablement tool.

Benefits

This team successfully assembled their request management practice within Workfront. They were able to leverage a common queue management structure for the following:

• Make a request in a request queue from a single-entry point.

• Communicate directly between the requester and administrator.

• Review the request for initial details, approvals, follow-up, and other actions without having to copy and paste between emails and Excel.

• Transfer requests between administrators, especially when taking time off or doing follow-up actions for another person.

• Isolate requests correctly to lessen the unintended exposure of personal data.

• Begin to collect request data on one common location to support long-term reporting.