How Aurora MHR provide exception internal support with Deskpro

The Problem

Aurora Mental Health & Recovery were previously using a free solution that had limitations, but as a non-profit, they needed an affordable solution that would help them to operate more effectively.

“We were using a free version of Spiceworks. It was fine, but free software comes with cons. As a non-profit, we were growing, and we didn’t have great organizational leadership. It made it hard for the central part of the company to have good support and relationships.”

While evaluating help desks, they wanted a solution that would centralize their requests and provide better visibility over requests and work. The team then found Deskpro which they felt fulfilled their needs in creating good relationships internally while remaining cost-effective.

Kimberly Gilmour, IT Project Manager, explained, “Deskpro is affordable compared to other options, especially on the lower plans, which makes it a good spot to come in at.”

When Kimberly joined the team, they had already been using Deskpro for some time, but she found her background in customizable performance platforms made learning the system fairly pain-free. “When my boss showed me around Deskpro, I thought I could probably teach myself that in about a day and be ready to go.”

The Solution

The team at Aurora Mental Health & Recovery primarily uses Deskpro to manage staff requests, these can range from small issues to large-scale projects.

“We get requests from staff to work on certain things. Sometimes those things are just everyday requests like my computer is doing weird things. Or sometimes it’s please build this whole new functionality in your electronic health record system and include these five teams in it. So that's a full-on project.”

Kimberly and the team have found Deskpro can be used as a solution for a wide variety of their projects and help them to efficiently deliver results. Kimberly discussed how their organization had changed its name from Aurora Mental Health Center to Aurora Mental Health & Recovery, and that “We actually used Deskpro when we rebranded. That two-word change created a lot of work over quite a few months.”

The Benefits

Alongside the rebranding, the team was undertaking a large technical project moving from an On-Premise Active Directory to Cloud. “We leveraged Deskpro for basically every IT aspect of that project.” These projects impacted every contract and every member of staff, so they required a high level of organization and communication.

“Every organization that we have a contract with our name on it that they need to send it to had to be changed to the correct name. We had to tell them that our email domain was changing. And make sure all of our staff had the correct information so when everything changed they were able to log into their email, they knew how to access the wifi, they knew how to use everything, but now on their slightly different email”

“Deskpro was where we brainstormed a list of tasks and then put them in as tickets, and linked them as parent-child tickets.” Managing the project this way ensured Kimberly could have visibility over the different tasks her team was working on, helping her stay on top of their progress, and understanding individual workloads.

At one point, the team struggled to understand what needed to be worked on urgently, because they had hundreds of tickets assigned to them for the project. To resolve this, Kimberly used the filtering options in the help desk to improve visibility in individual agent queues: “I leveraged the backlog of tickets with a backlog sub status to indicate the tickets that are not being actively worked on right now. Which made it very easy to filter for.”

Kimberly also appreciates the ability to provide visibility to Aurora MHR’s directors. “Our service desk can very easily communicate with users and myself and any of the directors can pop in and see what anyone's workload is at any time.” And they have found that Deskpro has improved the ability of the facilities departments to provide support, “previously the facilities department had an old school ticketing system, they couldn't communicate with users.”

After moving the team to Deskpro, their staff naturally adapted to submitting tickets via the Help Center to communicate with facilities. “Before we announced the change, they found they could submit facilities tickets via that Help Center form, and it's natural and easy for them to do.”

Plus, the customizability of their help desk’s configuration helps the team perform more efficiently as they get all the information they need when a request is submitted. “I really appreciate is the user form versus the agent form. We have lots more information on the agent form.” And when their staff submits requests the forms store the necessary information that lets their agents act quickly “It pre-populates with various things like their cost center. So if they want to purchase something, we don't have to remember details and we just need their supervisor to approve.”

The Future

The future for Aurora Mental Health & Recovery with Deskpro is upgrading to the latest version, Deskpro Horizon.

With the transition to Deskpro Horizon, they look forward to utilizing several new features available on the platform. One significant feature they anticipate using is the integration with Azure DevOps, which aligns with Kimberly's team's workflow for sprint planning. She mentioned, "having integration with Azure DevOps would be extremely beneficial."

Another feature they are excited about after upgrading to Horizon is the Kanban view for agile project management. Kimberly expressed her enthusiasm, stating, "I'm really looking forward to the Kanban capabilities. I will be kind of living in it. The quarter that each project is assigned and have a Kanban of that so we can have a list of all of our projects."

The team will be expanding by adding additional departments to the help desk. “We have two or three other departments that want to start using Deskpro.” With their upcoming move to Horizon, they will soon get access to all these new features and more.