Getting a grip on your school’s day-to-day IT operation

Neil Limbrick FISBL, partner and IT consultant at Limbrick Consultancy LLP, founder of theEducationCollective and ambassador for the Association of Network Managers in Education, discusses how day-to-day IT operations can be managed in schools 

It is now more important than ever to make sure you are maximising your resources – and, when it comes to IT, this is particularly difficult because it has so many functions within the education environment. I have previously discussed the advantages of breaking down your IT strategy into different areas – and breaking down your day-to-day operations and decision-making processes can be just as beneficial.

There are ten key areas to consider:

• Service desk: this is the way that faults are recorded, new equipment is requested and general help is obtained; it’s is about communication between users and technical support.

• Incident management: if the service desk is about communicating an issue then incident management is about getting the issue fixed, managing the workflow and keeping on top of all the requests.

• Problem management: most incidents are one-off issues but if an incident occurs frequently – either affecting lots of users or happening repeatedly for a single user – then it is referred to as a problem. Recognising a problem helps minimise the number and severity of issues involved.

• Change management: this is the process of managing the implementation of changes to hardware, software or services to minimise disruption of planned changes, and should not be confused with release or configuration management. For example, changing from one MIS provider to another is change management; however moving to a newer version of your existing MIS would be release management. 

• Configuration management: hardware and software does not just work straight out of the box – you need to configure them specifically for your organisation. This process should be managed to ensure continuity, with changes to configurations carefully considered and documented.

• Release management: this is about deploying patches and updates to existing software and hardware rather than replacing it completely.

• Availability and capacity management: this is important in order to ensure that your end-users are able to depend on IT. Availability and capacity management will help you see potential problems before they become a reality; this will improve the design of the infrastructure to eliminate single points of failure.

• Service level management: this is the measure of the performance of all aspects of IT, from internal systems through to external providers.

• Service continuity management: with the ever-increasing threat of cyber-attacks this has never been as important. This is about understanding which are the most critical systems, and knowing how to respond if a significant issue happens.

• Financial management: this helps schools to understand how much their provision costs, when additional spend might be necessary, and knowing the best way to get value for money.

These areas apply to organisations regardless of their size or whether IT is handled in-house or through a managed service or other third-party provider; what differs is simply where the accountability and responsibility sit. 

If you have any concerns about IT in your organisation, you will welcome the reassurance and clear structure that implementing processes for each of these areas can bring. They will introduce lines of responsibility and accountability to processes that are already happening within your organisation. 

In upcoming articles I will be going into some of these areas in more detail to help you get an understanding of what they could look like in your school.