Northumbria University Technical Services About Northumbria University Northumbria University is based in Newcastle upon Tyne. It is the largest university in the north-east of England with over 33,000 students from 130 countries. It has the highest number of employed graduates from north-east universities and one of the most effective enterprise support facilities run by a UK university.
Challenge When the university chose to implement Tribal’s student and course management system SITS in 2005 it didn’t have the IT expertise in-house to handle the new system. External expertise was sought rather than train university staff in a brand new market leading external system where the university didn’t have existing knowledge.
Solution The university chose a gold contract for technical services from Tribal for SITS, to make sure that expertise was available without university staff having to be in post. The university looks after the physical hardware and networking, Tribal looks after everything else and it’s all included in the contract. This includes implementing upgrades, monitoring for uptime, applying forms and software updates.
“Tribal is an extended team of ours, we have a very good working relationship with Tribal.” - Melinda Cook “No-one’s ever said ‘that’s not included’, we always get help. We’d highly recommend getting a contract.”
“I can’t sing Tribal’s praises highly enough – Jack and Ian are great, they know the system and how it’s set up, they’re brilliant when they come here and we have the best of both worlds both remotely and face-to-face.”
“In another instance, the systems were going very slow during the exam boards and they didn’t know why – the system crawled to a standstill. The university contacted Tribal’s helpdesk and Tribal dialled into the system remotely, looked at key areas and resolved it very quickly.” “The Tribal helpdesk are extremely helpful in resolving problems – such as any issues over the speed and technical side, but also go the extra mile,” comments Melinda. As an example, the university had an infrastructure meeting regarding the hardware supporting SITS, where the Tribal team were able to advise the specifications for new hardware infrastructure required for speediest running.” Fast response times
Benefits Speedy implementation and upgrades “Even the initial implementation of the system and it going live in 2005 was quicker using the Tribal technical services contract,” explains Melinda Cook, Head of Student Records and Data Management, Academic Registry. “This meant we could go from purchasing the system to live in just a few months.”
“Whilst it’s hard to quantify exact time/cost savings, the university gets an instant response from Tribal and any problem gets fixed swiftly – there’s always someone at Tribal who can help even if they’re not on site.” “Tribal also aims to work around our busiest times,” adds Melinda. “We recently had an upgrade issue and Tribal were able to sort it out on the Saturday, so that it was up and running for Monday.”
“Tribal is very easy to get hold of and we feel solving any issues is their number one priority. They can often resolve issues very quickly on site or even by phone.”
“Tribal understands the urgency of accessing data for the university’s staff, people in faculties have got to get the data immediately for exam boards, for example, and Tribal will escalate and resolve issues very quickly.”
“The contract comes in especially handy for upgrades. When I talk to other institutions, they seem to have more issues around software updates and the length of time taken and expertise required – whereas we don’t tend to experience those kinds of problem with upgrades.”
She concludes, “Tribal’s staff are the experts – having a contract means we don’t need to retain technical resources for maintaining and updating SITS or worrying about training people in-house and keeping them at the university. Up-to-date risks are always covered.”
Troubleshooting Melinda cites some examples where having the contract has come in particularly useful: “At one point the system virtually stopped working – Tribal quickly identified the drain on the database and worked out that it was due to something else happening at the institution, the university was running a programme against a live database during clearing.”
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