University of Sheffield

How a Health Check gave clarity to the University’s ITSM Roadmap

We recently spoke to Martin Staley, Head of Service Operations and Governance at The University of Sheffield, about their recent TOPdesk Health Check, which is a tool used to assess an organisation’s service excellence.

We talked about how Martin and his team found the process, the outcomes he found most useful, and what the University’s next steps are.

What were your reasons for having the health check?

The initial reason was that it was included in our package! But we also wanted to fully understand how the we were using TOPdesk and to assess the performance of our operations, as we knew it would identify areas where we weren’t using it to its full potential. We were also building our own ITSM roadmap and wanted to see how we could link the Health Check recommendations into it.

How did you find the experience of the Health Check, from booking and prep to the final presentation?

It was a great experience. The main thing that worked for us was that the health check was very low impact. There was no downtime on the system, and it didn’t take hours of the team’s time and resource in the prep stage. In the preparation questionnaire we had to make sure we filled it in truthfully – warts and all – to ensure that we got the most out of the Health Check, and this is something I’d recommend others do if they undertake one. The resulting presentation pinpointed our weaknesses, but we were pleased to find that the roadmap we were given had recommendations and solutions for those weaknesses.

Speaking of the results of the Health Check, could you talk a little about what was provided to you and what you found most useful?

The presentation was really detailed and well put together. It broke down the sections that were being assessed and went through the questionnaire we’d filled in. This was useful as we found that we had benchmarked ourselves quite realistically, and the Health Check even marked us as being a level higher in maturity than we thought. The findings were then incorporated into our own roadmap.

What was the most useful part of the experience?

The results, outcomes, and recommendations themselves were obviously useful, and it was nice to get confirmation that our internal roadmap was heading in the right direction. The health check was done remotely, and as I mentioned it was beneficial to have a Health Check that had no downtime on the system.

It has given us clarity on what our next steps will be in improving the way we use TOPdesk at the University of Sheffield, and the presentation itself was a useful tool for us to present back to the senior leadership team.

Based on your experience, would you recommend a Health Check to other customers?

I absolutely would recommend it to other TOPdesk customers, and I’d pay for it even if it wasn’t included in our package. The end-to-end process was slick and professional, and it gave us an enormous amount of data that would have been impossible to get without your expertise.

Want to find out more about our Health Check?

If you’d like to book or find out more about our Health Checks, please click here.