For more than 30 years, The University of Notre Dame’s Help Desk had been seen as a “beloved institution.” It consistently earned high marks on campus satisfaction surveys from students, faculty and staff.

But at some point, beloved isn’t enough.

During a session at HDI’s Service & Support World, Chris Gillis, the director of the service desk, Mike Voss, manager of the service desk; and Hannah Elliott, manager of the service desk, walked through what it takes to evolve a function that everyone loves into something that the university can’t function without.

To understand why change was necessary, you have to understand how IT works at the University of Notre Dame. It’s not one monolithic department. Here’s a snapshot of what’s going on:

• Central OIT handles enterprise infrastructure (networking, Gmail, endpoint management).
• Some areas, like athletics, have embedded IT staff funded through OIT.
• Schools like the Mendoza College of Business and the law school have their own dedicated IT directors and technicians.
• And then there’s everyone else, departments without dedicated support who funnel everything through the Help Desk on an as-needed basis.

Got it? Sheesh! That’s a lot of complexity for one team to navigate. And for years, the Help Desk did it through institutional knowledge and goodwill.

“It was reactive support,” Gillis says. “People called, people walked in and that was the support provided. It was the definition of a traditional Help Desk.”

What it wasn’t: proactive, scalable or set up to tell a story to leadership about the value it was delivering.

The case for change

When a longtime Help Desk manager retired, Gillis saw an opening to rethink the model. At the time, he was managing a separate team called Help Desk Dispatch, which had started blending Tier 1 and Tier 2 work. The two teams were doing similar work under different names, confusing everyone outside the department. He decided it was best to combine everyone into one team.

Next, he and Voss built a career pipeline program, hiring early-career people as temp-on-call staff with the goal of bringing them into full-time roles. They created promotion paths — IT Assistant 1 to IT Assistant 2 — with more pay and responsibility at each level.

“That is one of the things I’m most proud of that our team has done,” Gillis says. “We made career growth very intentional.”

Operationalizing the merge

Once the Service Desk launched, Voss took on the work of making it function. The first move was to collapse the phone system into a single queue with a single number. No more pressing 1 for this team and 2 for that team.

Then, came the harder work. The team decided what Tier 1 work looked like, versus what needed escalation to embedded IT consultants. They created a secondary assignment group in ServiceNow so that when a ticket came in from, say, the School of Architecture, both the service desk and the School of Architecture IT team could see it in real time, not after the fact.

“That created better collaboration and communication to make sure we’re taking care of our customers in a streamlined way,” Voss says.

Standardized handoff language, a shared Google group with IT consultants across campus, daily standup meetings were aimed at the same goal: making sure a customer never fell through the cracks between teams.

They also ran a skills assessment to identify technical gaps across the staff and built training to help them ramp up. The cross-training that followed was the hardest part, Voss says. That’s because everybody on the team only did specific tasks: some people only answered phones, worked in imaging or handled walks-in.

“Having everybody do everything is hard, but critical to the success of what we’re able to do,” Voss says. “But now, if an MFA reset floods the queue or an on-campus event needs extra hands, we can flex the team wherever it’s needed.”

But letting staff know about all these changes is important, Gillis says.

“We communicated a lot and we would always share what was coming,” Gillis says. “And we’d still hear, ‘Well, this is the first we’re hearing about this.’ We had to really understand how to communicate with people on the team to make sure they’re ready to receive the information the way they need to, to internalize it.”

The culture of yes (and its consequences)

The University of Notre Dame’s Service Desk adopted a culture of yes. Campus partners started coming to them with new services to take on and the answer was almost always yes. That’s how the scope exploded: Mendoza College of Business frontline calls, classroom support dispatching, computer builds and deploys and early conversations about onboarding the procurement office’s help desk (which would make the University of Notre Dame’s Service Desk the first to handle a non-IT function).

“We branded ourselves very specifically as the Service Desk, not the IT Service Desk,” Gillis says. “The vision is one place you go for help for service on campus.”

But “yes” has a cost. Services were getting added before training was complete. Sometimes, things weren’t documented. And the staff was getting exhausted.

“Growth is only successful if it is sustainable,” Voss says. “A team that is 100% utilized has 0% capacity for innovation and empathy.”

Here’s how they slowed down:

• Took deliberate pauses after major rollouts to make sure the team was solid before the next change came through.
• Pilot phases, where a handful of team members would pressure-test changes before they went live.
• Memorizing this sentence: “Yes, but maybe not this month. Could we start two months from now?”

Building structure without building silos

All the changes were exciting, but it was taking a toll on Gillis and Voss. At one point, Gillis had 14 direct reports, plus a rotating pool of up to 25 temp-on-call staff. Even though everything lived in one ServiceNow assignment group (incidents, requests, interactions, loaner programs, classroom work, field deployments), reporting was getting to be difficult.

The solution was to split the work into two operational areas: Service Desk Operations and Service Desk Field Services. Elliott was hired to lead Service Desk Operations. Her department covers what happens behind the scenes: phones, chat, triage, imaging, inventory. Field Services covers what the campus sees: deployments, classroom support, in-person visits. However, everyone still cross-trains with both departments.

“Having two managers in place makes it easier when people have questions,” Elliott says. “It allows people to have that go-to resource while still allowing Mike and me to keep our heads clear. We want every person who steps foot in our university to know that if they have a problem, Service Desk is going to fix it.”

Editor's Note: This article is an editorial recap of a conference session based on the reporter's notes, observations, and interpretation of the discussion. It is intended to highlight key themes and takeaways and should not be considered a transcript or an official representation of the speaker's or organization's views.