“New year, new me!”
“This is going to be our year!”
“A fresh start!”
We’ve all heard the generic platitudes that come along with the New Year, and while most are overused or positively delusional, they aren’t all entirely untrue.
Whether it’s for personal goals, your work life, or your organization’s plans, the New Year is a great time to reflect, take stock, and set new plans and projects into motion. More specifically, it’s a great time to plan and tackle new projects if you’re a member of your organization’s IT team.
The beginning of the year can provide some planning time before the IT tickets start flooding into the queue. And a wise thing to do with any such downtime is to take a look at your workflows and solutions that are in place, and identify what’s working, what’s not, and where you can find more efficiencies.
So where do you start?
Pull data and look back at tickets from the previous year. Pay attention to any trends that may arise as you look at the data from a higher level. Day-to-day, you may not notice that you’re getting many similar tickets, but when looking at the data for the entire year, you may start to see some trends. Look at your close rates, and try to identify common issues your users are having that may need a more permanent solution than putting in an IT ticket every time the same issue arises. Printing and scanning are often mundane tasks that give users major headaches, thus creating a backlog of IT tickets. If it’s identified that your team is spending a disproportionate amount of time on tickets related to printing and scanning, it may be time to look into a solution that can drastically diminish the amount of those tickets, or eliminate them entirely. And if you ask me, checking out ScrewDrivers® from Tricerat is a great place to start!
In a perfect world, your IT team has unlimited resources and budget. But in the real world, that’s rarely the case. IT teams, especially those for smaller companies, can be stretched very thin and not always have the budget or tools to implement the proper solution. But if you understand the goals of your organization and the restraints that you have to work with, you’ll be better able to identify the proper solutions for your organization.
Depending on the scope of the project, it could send ripples throughout your organization. Some new implementations only affect the workflow of your IT team, thus requires no communication or follow up with users. Other new implementations will require organization-wide buy-in. These projects will require more planning, communication, and research, as you could possibly run the risk of negative impact on users if a deployment goes wrong. To use printing and scanning as an example again (because that just so happens to be our specialty), you can rollout deployment of ScrewDrivers as such that your users never need to worry about anything because your IT team can control which printers and scanners each of your users has access to with ease from a simple drag-and-drop dashboard.
No matter the size of your organization or the goals of your IT team, implementing new solutions and developing projects requires time and resources. And the beginning of the new year can often be the perfect time to dive in.
