The Prince William County Schools System (a World-Class School Division) is located in Manassas Virginia and is currently the 2nd largest school system in Virginia. Prince William is a K-12 school system located in Northern Virginia just 40 minutes outside of Washington DC. You can visit us on the web at: http://www.pwcs.edu
Prince William County Schools has a current student population of over 76,650*, with over 9,600 employees, 88 schools and is the second largest school system in Virginia.
The Challenge
Provide the capability for constituents (parents, teachers, employees and other members of the community) a way to request information from Prince William County School system and have this request directed to the most appropriate member of the organization to address their request. Our original method for tracking this information was done using a combination of emails and an Excel spreadsheet to store this information and was used to follow-up on each request. The difficulty comes with there being hundreds of requests made and then this information being disseminated using email and no efficient and collective way to keep track of who, what, when and where. We need to answer these questions:
The email and excel spreadsheet is process was used for a sometime and it was clear that tracking requests using this method was not working sufficiently to provide information in a timely manner so we began looking for an automated solution.
The Solution
We considered building a system using in-house staff which would cost significant amounts of time and money and then considering we did not have sufficient resources available to commit to the effort, it was decided to consider products in the marketplace to solve the problem. Many products were in the market, some expensive and those providing many bells and whistles which most were really not needed. Others systems were really help desk or inventory systems that had been converted to track issues but very few with the real focus of tracking requests or issues.
During the process of locating a product we came very close to selecting a product only to find out that it did not have the appropriate level of security and control on issues and the ability to control each issue down to each department level within the organization. We then came across FIT Tracking Solutions and downloaded the FIT | IssueTrack software and had the software up and running in a very short period of time.
We required the following in an Issue Tracking System:
The need to have a hierarchical departmental level reporting structure which is multi-level. An example of this is that if I am an employee in the Accounts Payable department that I can see all issues for the Accounts Payable department. If the Accounts Payable Department reports to Finance Services and I am in charge of Finance Services, I can see all issues for both the Finance Services and Accounts Payable departments.
The best feature of the system is its ability for companies purchasing the product to be able to customize the look and feel and add additional fields and their relationships and basically provides a customized front end to our organizations needs. From a process perspective it took a little time to understand how requests moved thru our organization using the old methodology. Once these processes were understood we used this information and added over 300 user names to the system along with hundreds of Departments/Groups, their logical reporting relationships, and to setup appropriate level of security.
The system has been up and running for over 2 years with a 99% uptime with our services being securely hosted. Choosing the hosted solution did not require any additional staff, hardware or the need to administer to the system with already overworked staff members. Currently we have thousands of requests being serviced annually and each an every person involved with the solution is identified for future reference along with any correspondence on these issues.
We recommend FIT|IssueTrack, by FIT Tracking Solutions for these reasons:
