At a large university, all IT service requests were triaged through the university's information center. While this setup was effective in routing the requests to the correct IT departments, it prevented IT teams at different departments or colleges, known as the distributed IT (DIT), from directly communicating with the IT service providers. To improve efficiency and time to solution, a template was created to facilitate the DIT teams in escalating certain requests directly to IT service providers. A pilot study indicated that this template approach needed improvement as one fifth of the escalations were unnecessary and there was a lack of consistency in utilizing the IT service management platform, including documenting work performed and reason of escalation. The pilot study further suggested training is necessary to improve the effective use of the escalation template.
Design thinking, an iterative process in developing understanding of users, challenging assumptions, redefining problems, and identifying alternative strategies and solutions, has lately been adopted in designing training solutions. In this session, the presenters will introduce the concept of design thinking and how they utilized the design thinking process to design a training solution to improve the effective use of an escalation template among the DIT teams.
