Outgrowing siloed asset management and help ticketing

Located in Macy, Nebraska, UMÓⁿHOⁿ Nation Public Schools serves approximately 617 students from pre-K to 12th grade. As technology became more popular for teaching and learning, UMÓⁿHOⁿ Nation’s support teams felt their help ticketing, asset management, and facilities maintenance needs had outgrown their previous systems.

Keaton Harpham, UMÓⁿHOⁿ Nation’s IT Support Specialist, discussed how bare-bones help desk solutions and inefficient asset management made them consider a new K-12 support platform.

“We were looking for something a little more advanced,” said Harpham.

“Our old system had a lot of manual asset management, and we constantly relied on manual imports. What brought us to [Incident IQ] was the interconnectivity with Google. That allowed us to manage about a thousand of our assets through Google and sync it with Incident IQ.”

UMÓⁿHOⁿ Nation chose Incident IQ because of the features that were designed for the needs of K-12 teams. As an IT Support Specialist, Harpham appreciated how easy it was to integrate with the applications students and teachers use in the classroom. Now troubleshooting help requests was more streamlined than ever, and a unified platform helped a variety of support teams across the district.

“Once everything just started to flow, it just fit into what we wanted. We are very satisfied with Incident IQ,” said Harpham.

Combining help ticketing and facility workflows for better K-12 support

Once Harpham and UMÓⁿHOⁿ Nation started working with Incident IQ, they realized just how effective our workflow management tools could be for other support teams.

Harpham works with the help desk system for UMÓⁿHOⁿ Nation, and he’s seen how Incident IQ’s Ticket Wizard and Rules Engine streamlines his workflow. Ticket Wizard empowered UMÓⁿHOⁿ Nation’s staff to easily submit data-rich help requests with minimal manual data entry, and the Rules Engine automatically sends the help request to the right team as soon as a ticket is submitted.

“As soon as any of the subcategories under ‘maintenance’ is selected, I have a rule in place where it sends the ticket to our maintenance team. We also have a couple of custodial categories, and that gets the ticket sent to the custodial team. Every other help request is sent to IT,” said Harpham. 

Facilities and maintenance team members have also benefited from using Incident IQ Mobile—the app for iOS and Android that keeps support teams connected to help requests and work orders. The app helps UMÓⁿHOⁿ Nation’s facility team stay informed about work orders while on the field.

“So far, I’ve heard good feedback about Incident IQ [from facilities teams], and they’ve all adapted well,” observed Harpham. 

Establishing a unified platform for UMÓⁿHOⁿ Nation’s support teams has streamlined receiving and work help requests. Now, UMÓⁿHOⁿ Nation can work effectively, improve communication, and have district-wide visibility into help requests—all while making their responsibilities easier to tackle. 

Simplifying K-12 IT workflows with comprehensive visibility for devices and help requests

In his position as IT Support Specialist, Harpham appreciates the features that help him accomplish his daily tasks.

“I love the custom views for help tickets. I probably have 17 that I made myself, and it’s so easy to just click those and see the tickets,” said Harpham. 

Incident IQ districts use custom views to show reports based on a variety of data points. UMÓⁿHOⁿ Nation’s IT team accesses live-updating analytics that can show assets that haven’t been used in a designated time range, devices that are being used by someone other than their assigned user, tickets that haven’t been resolved by designated SLA timeframes, and more. 

Harpham also found that asset importation was easier with Incident IQ’s extensive toolkit.

“Mass importing is also a lot easier. We just had to import some laptops and projectors that we were waiting on, and it was very easy to accomplish,” said Harpham.

But there was another reason why the Nebraska district moved forward with Incident IQ—beyond useful IT tools. One of the biggest reasons UMÓⁿHOⁿ Nation chose Incident IQ was how it combined help ticketing, asset management, and facilities workflows on one intuitive platform.

“If I would say anything for us as a school, it’s that we wanted to work out of one platform. Now everything works in Incident IQ,” said Harpham. 

“It’s a very, very easy system to learn, and it’s nice to have all your eggs in one basket. It’s very nice to have that, especially for everything our district manages. If you’re walking down the hall and you’ve got five teachers telling you ticket issues, you can say, ‘Hey, put a ticket in Incident IQ,’ and it’s a lot easier to organize. I would definitely recommend Incident IQ for that.”

Is your K-12 district ready for a unified support workflow? Schedule a demo today, where we’ll have a one-on-one discussion about how Incident IQ can transform your district’s digital infrastructure.