Background
Nampa School District spans over 24 locations around Nampa, Idaho, and teaches over 14,000 students from kindergarten to twelfth grade. This northwestern district was at the forefront of one-to-one device initiatives—this school year marks their fourth year with their student device program.
As Nampa’s one-to-one program developed over the years, they realized that they needed a more comprehensive, easy-to-use support platform to monitor and work with their assets. Before implementing Incident IQ in 2021, Nampa’s history with IT support platforms was lackluster at best.
“Our previous system was hard to use, and it was not user-friendly for the staff member or the technical side,” recalls Laurie Ramsay, IT Helpdesk Supervisor for Nampa School District.
“I had a huge list of everything we were missing from [the previous system], and it just wasn’t working the way we wanted it to.”
Nampa’s primary goal? Finding a workflow management platform that could work proactively with help tickets, produce insightful reports for Nampa’s IT team, and provide detailed asset information. Thankfully, Nampa found all that and more with Incident IQ.
Streamlining help ticketing workflows for Nampa School District
The first layer of technical support at Nampa School District is actually handled by a select group of students. Nampa has student tech teams who use Incident IQ to provide quick customer service for help tickets.
“When we first went one-to-one, we had to figure out a way to support everybody,” Ramsay recalls. “We have a program where a student can sign up for the class, get credit for it, and then they would be the tier one support for any student having issues with their device.”
Ramsay herself works with two help desk analysts and four help desk specialists—the latter position was set up to oversee the student tech teams. As the district’s Incident IQ administrator, Ramsay works with her IT technicians to assign permissions to agents and design workflows that work best for their department.
In Nampa’s case, that meant giving student tech teams the information they needed while still observing the district’s data privacy policies. Student tech teams use Incident IQ to access the information they need to resolve common help requests, but their permissions are tailored to ensure they only have access to relevant data.
“We made these students help desk agents on Incident IQ, but we also arranged for some individual tasks that the typical students can’t do,” Ramsay adds.
Ramsay also appreciates being able to create rules for tickets, which automatically sort tickets based on specific factors like location or issue type, and can route these tickets to specific groups, such as the student tech teams.
“As an administrator, I’ve gone into Incident IQ and seen how we can make categories and create rules customized to fit our district’s needs. It’s like night and day from what we were using before,” Ramsay continues. “We absolutely love it. It is so easy to use.”
But for Ramsay, the biggest difference she’s observed is the depth and ease of Incident IQ’s search and reporting capabilities.
“One of the biggest things I appreciate about Incident IQ is the search feature. All we have to do is put in a partial name,” Ramsay explains. “No matter what piece of information we have— first name, last name, asset tag, ticket number—Incident IQ finds what we need. It easily searches for everything.”
The powerful search and reporting tools in Incident IQ help Ramsay and her team build various reports to keep district stakeholders informed.
“If we want to pull a report, all we have to do is say, ‘I want to filter by cracked screens,’ or ‘I want to filter iPads with a broken power button.’ It’s very easy to do.”
Incident IQ even enables Nampa School District to work and manage help tickets on the go.
“Our previous system had some missing features that we were looking for, and one of those items was the ability to operate on a [smartphone],” Ramsay details.
“Our building techs move from building to building, so they don’t always have their computers open. With Incident IQ Mobile, they can look at work orders, alter them, put notes in the system, and view reports from their phones.”
Today, Nampa School District has the comprehensive, simple-to-use help ticketing system they had dreamed of.
Improving asset data and device assignment for Nampa School District
Another unique feature of the Nampa School District support staff are their Resource Managers. They share many of the duties of school librarians, but Resource Managers are also in charge of distributing devices to students.
Resource Managers can assign devices in Incident IQ, view location information and more with a quick scan from a USB barcode scanner.
“If a student ever needs a swap or replacement device, Resource Managers use Incident IQ. So far, we’re getting positive feedback from that,” Ramsay explains.
With easier device distribution, accurate asset data, and in-depth asset reporting, Ramsay’s team has seen improved visibility and functionality across the district.
“When you have a one-to-one district, trying to keep track of assets is really hard, and we want the best way to do that. We’re always working to improve those processes. Incident IQ just has more features and works better for assets and keeping track of them,” says Ramsay.
Nampa School District’s IT team had ambitious goals to work smarter with data-rich help tickets and have a detailed view over their assets. Incident IQ met those needs in a way that was easy to incorporate into Nampa’s existing workflow.
“[Incident IQ is] truly built for K-12. If we need something, you’ve thought about it, and that matters. It matters to have software that’s geared towards school districts,” Ramsay says.
Our purpose at Incident IQ is to help support teaching and learning through intuitive, dynamic workflow tools centered around the unique needs of K-12 districts. If your district is looking for better help from your support tools, schedule a demo with us. We would love to sit down with your team and show how Incident IQ can transform your IT support.