2. Discussion overview
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Walkthrough of the organization
Strengths and weaknesses
Services we offer
Current service levels
How to nationalize the organization
How to reduce costs w/o affecting service
Overall strategy
“Where we’ve been, where we’re going”
4. Walkthrough of the Organization
“Who we are”
• Experience levels (on average):
Sr. Mgmt
DTM
Sys Admin
Techs
13 years
14 years
11 years
13 years
• Certifications:
MCSE
MCSA
MCDST
MCP
8
11
17
47
A+
Network+
Project+
Security+
ITIL
CNA/CNE
8
4
2
5
1
2
5. Walkthrough of the Organization
“Recent IPM goals”
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Metrics
Cross training
Brown-bag lunches
Certifications
6. Walkthrough of the Organization
“Our support environment”
• 85 offices across the country
• 3,800 clients
• Standardized hardware and software
• Dell notebooks, desktops, and servers
• Microsoft Windows XP operating system
• Microsoft Office 2003 Professional
• 3,000+ software titles
7. Walkthrough of the Organization
“Our support environment”
• Software license pools
• New offices, relocations, and expansions
• Video conferencing
• 20 sites standardized on Polycom hardware
with dedicated circuits
• Blackberries and broadband air cards
8. Strengths
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Impacts PBS&J’s
bottom line
Experience / skillsets
Customer service
Ability to get/keep our clients chargeable
Collaboration and teamwork
Collective talents
Knowledge of client-driven applications
Proactive monitoring of equipment and
environment
10. Services we offer
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Remote and on-site installation and support
After-hours maintenance and support
Technology hardware support
Remote access support
• Home offices, hotel offices, client-side offices
• Office planning
• Relocations, expansions, closings
11. Services we offer
• Software licensing, inventory, and support
Microstation
Geopak
ArcGIS
AutoCAD
InDesign CS2
Photoshop
HEC-RAS
FDOT client
Acrobat
BDE
Civil 3D
SelectCAD
Illustrator
Flowmaster
Office 2003
Windows
AEView
Civil InRoads
Project
Primavera
Crystal
Reports
HCS
StormCAD
STAAD Pro
GuideSIGN
FloodMap
VISSIM
XPSWIMM
SureTrak
EPASWIMM
WinBDS
SewerCAD
ICPR
SAP
SignCAD
WordPerfect
H2ONET
XTOOLS
MDX
MWH
12. Services we offer
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Consultant role to technology issues
Data backup/restore/recovery operations
Severe weather preparations
Disaster recovery
Company mergers and acquisitions
Telephony moves, adds, changes
Asset inventory
13. Service levels
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47 employees in national support
1,800 support requests per week
68.5% weekly closed request ratio
How requests get to national support
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30% via online help desk
10% via toll free phone number
38% via in-person communication
22% via application auto-generation
15. Reduce costs w/o impacting service
• Computer, printer, fax assets
• Distribution, allocation, procurement
• Does 45% of population need a notebook?
• Reduce trickle down
• Webex
• Asset management and disposal
16. Reduce costs w/o impacting service
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POTS line based fax machines
User education and training
Local printers / 3rd party printer services
Virtualization
Centralized data backup
NAS instead of file servers
17. Overall strategy
• Maintain chargeability of our clients
• High level of satisfaction
• Courteous, knowledgeable support
• Reliable systems
• Provide a productive computing platform
• Keep PBS&J’s edge on competition
• Continue our staff’s professional growth
• Reward and retain valuable employees
18. “Where we’ve been, where we’re going”
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Minimum hardware recommendation
Enterprise-wide deployments
Risk and Emergency Management (REM)
Security Initiatives
Consolidation / virtualization
Community Involvement – KidsCLASS
Centralized backup
Wide Area File System
There are “technical” and “managerial” career ladders
Benefits:
Brings us a diverse group of talent
Results in employee satisfaction. Employees get to wear multiple “hats” instead of being pigeon-holed into a specific task
Reduces need for specific groups (software group, hardware group, printer group)
A majority of national support (73%) upgraded their certifications as part of their 2007 goals and objectives
Microsoft is our primary certification (since we’re a Microsoft shop)
Employees who have demonstrated proficiency with Microsoft certification have gone to other technical areas
Since the TO re-org in 2006, the regional layer of management was removed to promote consistency and standardization across the country. Employee goals and objectives were reduced in number to result in more focus.
Work metrics in the areas of
Remedy- Timing, integration into daily work habits, detailed work logs, etc.
Work quality –
Follow procedures on TOPP
Demonstrate proficiency with TO utilities and tools
E-purchasing
SecureFusion
Altiris
Encourage cross training to provide support depth among techs. This maintains a level of service when techs are unavailable for whatever reason (illness, PTO)
Encourage brown-bag lunches to clients to increase knowledge of common support issues (to reduce them in the future)
Knowledge transfer with fellow TO folks
Tutorials with clients
Certifications as shown on previous slide
Any downtime directly relates to our clients’ ability to be billable, chargeable
Support involves more than discussions on the phone.
The engineer environment varies by location
The engineer focuses on the needs of the client.
National support “lives” with them. They know and cater to the engineer’s specific needs
I believe that our strengths follow the company’s tagline of “building a great place to work.” (as seen in the firm’s publications)
PBS&J’s success depends on how employees feel about the Company and their jobs.
PBS&J is a service organization and its service is dependent on the people who support the service (that’s us!)
Experience, customer service, skillsets keeps our clients billable which impacts the bottom line.
We collaborate with other groups (both in TO and outside of TO) to reach a common goal or objective
We know where to get the information on subjects we don’t have complete familiarity with.
Knowledge of client-driven applications
3,000 software titles brings support “uniqueness” to each district
Act as liasion between client/engineer and software expert b/c we speak the same language
Adjust to needs of clients / external clients to help them with their technology needs.
All our clients are not the same. PBS&J is a multi-disciplined organization
Proactive monitoring of equipment and environment (Est. replacement cost $2.5 M) This cost doesn’t include data/related work-hours that is stored onto these devices
OpenManage
Weathergoose environmental room monitors
Server room checklists
CADD
CADD currently makes up about 25% of support requests
CADD knowledge is a value-add for national support
Limited resources make it hard to find and expert in CADD as well as in IT.
Differentiate support requests from training requests (training should be part of an employee’s work skills)
Remote office support
Limited resources available to support remote offices the same way as larger offices
Standardization
A regular area of change since it involves a lot of planning and energy.
They benefit the company by simplifying the support environment and creating efficiencies.
A ongoing “work-in-progress”
Support all clients, regardless of their location
There are about 17 office relocations per year
Technology hardware support includes computers, notebooks, servers, printers, and plotters
Software license pools
At least 45 software license pools across the country
Less than 30% of requests do not close weekly:
Awaiting parts, deliveries, approvals – We set early thresholds on purchases in order to maintain a short turnaround time from order to invoice to payment.
Awaiting client availability
Project-based requests that span longer than a week
How do we receive feedback?
Remedy follow-up requests are sent to national support leadership on every 15th closed support request
Gets local TO involved with the feedback progress – Shows our interest in this area.
A Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) project, a Corporate-wide initiative a few years ago.
Upon closure of each request, the client has the option to leave feedback. Feedback is reported on a monthly basis
How do requests get to us?
Released the online help desk last year– 30% of our client base has migrated to this method
People like variety, and we meet that need by providing multiple ways to reach us for help
Auto generated requests promote complete-ness to common transactions such as employee hires/termination
Standardization a few years ago was regionalized and not everyone did things the same way. We’ve made progress, but have more to do. Examples of items new, in-progress, or complete:
Printer/server naming conventions
Network documentation
Office configurations
Centralized backups
File structure (some permission-based, others not)
Drive mappings (home drive, common drive, project drive)
Reaction by CADD managers / CADD files and their reference files
Local computer administrative privileges
CADD
License pooling
Currently configured by division since they are paying for it
If TO buys CADD software, then there are greater economies of scale
PBS&J hasn’t purchased a new AutoCAD licenses. Over the last few years, TO has renewed maintenance on licenses (and pooled them) no longer wanted by the technical divisions. A new AutoCAD license costs $3,000+ each.
Desktop control
Use GPO’s to minimize customizations
Risks the impact against company culture because they like personalizing their computers.
Losing ability to set their own screen saver generated static a few years ago.
Computer, printer, fax assets (Assume ownership)
Decisions are currently handled by 100+ divisions nationwide
Newest hardware is closest to the money
Computers sit idle in one division while another division buys new computers
Notebooks have higher security risks when left in the office overnight (not a true mobile use)
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Purchase should be made based on need, function, role
Notebooks cost as high as twice the cost of desktops--- and don’t perform as well as desktops.
Trickle down: A purchase of one computer leads to a rebuilding/redistribution of 5-7 computers
Webex
Substitute Live Meeting for in-house desktop sharing instead of using fee-based Webex
Asset management and disposal
Formalize this program-- Either through a recycling program or Ebay or Craig’s list
Create a notification/action procedure for computers that are near to end of life cycle
POTS line based fax machines
A $25/month cost per fax line.
Fax numbers printed on business cards. There is client awareness of fax numbers.
User education and training
Increase role of PBS&J University from a coordinator to a provider/mentor
Regionalize training by bringing a single instructor on-site to do training en masse (instead of sending folks to external classrooms)
Local printers / 3rd party printer services
Reduce model-specific toner, cables, utility power.
NAS equipment instead of power vaults for big-time disk space needs
Uses a special server OS that includes Microsoft’s Single Instance Storage (SIS) which prevents duplicate files on the same volume
Minimum hardware recommendation to 1 GB RAM / 1 GHz CPU (October-December 2007)
Built 160 computers in this time period
Upgraded 845 memory banks in this time period
Enterprise-wide deployments (Keeps company running optimally, promotes standardization) (also in a 3 month time period)
Active Directory, Exchange, Backup Exec, Windows XP/Office 2003: Completely rebuilt 3700+ computers with a standardized image
This will happen again in the future when we upgrade to Windows 7.
Windows server 2000 to Server 2003
Miscellaneous patches, Oracle templates
Risk and Emergency Management
Very mobile group
Support does not follow that of a typical brick/mortar office
Assembled their mobile command centers – Satellite internet, wireless, plotting, etc.
Their client’s contracts require them to be mobile in days after a contract is awarded.
Security initiatives (Example of how we assist other TO groups achieve their objectives)
Local administrative passwords
Rogue computers
Wireless network
Desktop and server hardening
Consolidation / virtualization
Virtualizing servers (using VMWare) to reduce hardware and their associated maintenance and support costs)
Wide Area File System
Promotes work-sharing by increasing file access speeds between offices