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Resource Capacity Planning Takes the Front Seat with Public Sector CIOs

IT departments in the public sector are under a lot of pressure to use resources more efficiently. Trying to do more with a stagnant IT budget often leads to cutting corners, but it doesn’t have to. Here are three ways IT leaders can improve resource capacity to shift time away from things like administrative tasks and redundant tickets toward more strategic initiatives.

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IT departments in the public sector are under a lot of pressure to use resources more efficiently. Trying to do more with a stagnant IT budget often leads to cutting corners, but it doesn’t have to. Here are three ways IT leaders can improve resource capacity to shift time away from things like administrative tasks and redundant tickets toward more strategic initiatives.

Manage all IT work on a single platform.

For many organizations, IT requests are processed in one place and projects are managed in another. Bringing IT service management and project portfolio management together within a single, unified platform can improve IT efficiency and allow CIOs to get a clearer view of available resources.

When resources are limited, IT employees often wear several hats. Few organizations have the luxury of maintaining separate staff for project work and fulfilling service requests. If employees must use separate systems for keeping track of projects and service tickets, it’s hard to know which tasks they’re responsible for at any given time. Additionally, navigating between multiple systems and updating each one individually can be cumbersome. As a result, employees spend too much time on administration instead of their core responsibilities.

IT incidents and projects in one location gives leaders an easy way to see the impact of both project and support tasks on IT resources. This helps leaders plan more effectively, enabling more efficient delivery of technology services. Having a dashboard that displays ticket work and project work together will also help IT departments with project intake and governance.

Embrace self-service.

How many times have you answered the same IT question? This is very time-consuming, and there is a better way to address these frequently asked questions. Organizations can reduce the number of inbound service requests by up to 70 percent by integrated an easy to navigate knowledge base into their self-service portal.

Here’s how this works: Every time you have an incident, you document what the problem was, what the person was doing when the problem occurred, what technology they were using, and how you resolved the problem. Then, you post this information online, so the next time somebody has that same problem, they can find the solution for themselves. By building a knowledge base as incidents arise, organizations can go from a handful of articles to thousands in just three or four months.

Develop an effective change management process.

About 80 percent of unplanned downtime is accidentally caused by IT staff themselves, according to research from the IT Process Institute. For instance, a technician might be trying to update a switch, but it accidentally brings the entire network down. IT staff must then spend valuable time resolving both the outage and issues that arise during that time. A formal change management process can prevent problems like this from occurring in the first place.

Improving change management involves developing an effective process for thinking through the potential impact of making an IT change, then deciding on a course of action that will cause the least amount of disruption. Effective change management can help prevent unforeseen complications, so your IT team spends less time resolving issues.

By adopting these three key strategies, your IT department can deploy staff time and budgets more judiciously, leading to more effective use of IT resources.

Written by Andrew Graf, Chief Product Strategist at TeamDynamix, a cloud based service and project management solution geared toward the public sector. Municipalities and agencies can benefit from having a single platform to manage IT tickets, problems, incidents, assets, change and projects. Further, end-users will be served faster and better with a portal for service requests – from IT, facilities, human resources and other key areas.

For more information, visit www.teamdynamix.com.