BUSINESS OUTCOMES
• Enabled lean IT and facilities teams to scale their impact without adding head count
• Freed up dozens of staff hours each week through automation and self-service documentation
• Gained end-to-end, real-time operational visibility to drive continuous improvement
THE CHALLENGE
Modernize to Deliver More
Access to a transformative education that prepares almost 1,400 students for success in college and life. This is the vision of Henderson Collegiate — an award-winning independent K-12 school in Henderson, North Carolina — and its team of around 186 educators and staff are deeply committed to making it a reality. Like many other charter and independent schools, however, it struggled to deliver exceptional outcomes and maintain the high level of accountability and professionalism it is known for with limited operational resources.
Managing technical support requests through manual processes using Google Forms and email had become increasingly difficult for the school’s two-person IT team. They weren’t always able to respond in a timely fashion due to the significant volume, and the workflow was a black box that left room for misses and miscommunication. And without a way to track support metrics or help ticket trends, it was impossible to benchmark performance and drive continuous improvement.
Asset management was a concern as well. Keeping up with inventory and maintenance history for Henderson Collegiate’s footprint of over 1,500 devices was a Herculean task for the already stretched-thin team. According to Ron Bush, the school’s Director of Technology, they could only respond, not act proactively. “Our approach was use it till it breaks, fix it when it is broken. There was no real back-end accountability to figuring out why it broke or how often it broke or when it needed to be replaced.”
Bush knew he had to find a way to deliver more with Henderson Collegiate’s lean team. The school needed to modernize its ticketing workflow to accelerate response and resolution times, prevent communication breakdowns, and elevate the user experience. It required centralized asset management to effectively track device inventory and preserve and protect these valuable resources. Real-time visibility to make data-informed decisions and gain administrative buy-in was critical as well. And all of this had to be tailored to meet — and evolve with — the unique demands of a small but dynamic institution.
THE PLAN
Streamline Operations With a Unified Platform
After evaluating other vendor offerings, Incident IQ was the clear choice for Henderson Collegiate. “The big thing that stuck out was the focus on K-12,” said Bush. “We just loved that was there compared to other platforms that were lacking a help desk platform, a unified asset management system, or a knowledge base.”
“We wanted those things to be tied together — to not have to cross-reference,” Bush explained. “Incident IQ does that very well, and that was a big deciding factor. I wanted to have a concise, consolidated platform, and that is what Incident IQ is for our school.”
Henderson Collegiate unified and optimized its help desk and asset management workflows, reducing friction with tailored implementations of iiQ Ticketing and iiQ Assets. The centralized ticketing system ensures all requests are received, enables the IT team to share the workload seamlessly, and supplies stakeholders with up-to-the-minute status updates. Integration with FileWave allows detailed information for all devices to be stored in a single location, providing instant access to health and life cycle insights and accelerating issue resolution.
The school heavily leveraged the ability to easily automate everything from help ticket routing and stakeholder follow-up to audit processes with the powerful Rules Engine, saving enormous amounts of time. This freed the IT team up to focus on high-value activities that facilitate uninterrupted student learning. “Rules engine is one of the best secret back-end tools Incident IQ has,” noted Bush. “I try to automate basically everything I possibly can in terms of our integration — it was game-changing for us.”
The ever-expanding knowledge base Henderson Collegiate put in place has turned out to be a real time-saver for the entire staff as well. The IT team documents resolutions to recurring issues, preventing repeat work, and creates articles with answers to common queries that empower colleagues to self-serve. New hires also use this robust information hub to ramp up more quickly.
THE OUTCOME
Future-Forward Support for First-Class Education
Since onboarding in 2019, the Incident IQ platform has become an integral part of Henderson Collegiate’s operations. “In my yearly budget, Incident IQ is line item number one, “ declared Bush. “It’s the first thing we open every single day, and we can’t imagine doing our jobs without it.”
This was never more true than during the pandemic. According to Bush, iiQ was instrumental in helping the IT team navigate that period, allowing them to track which students had devices, who returned them, and where damage occurred. It also equipped them to successfully tackle the increased volume of support requests without hiring additional staff. “I couldn’t have survived the pandemic and remote learning without Incident IQ,” he said. “It’s like having an extra person on the team, making it significantly easier to handle the multitude of different issues that come at us daily.”
After iiQ proved invaluable for its IT operations, Henderson Collegiate expanded the platform’s capabilities with iiQ Facilities, transforming a one-man, text-based system into a structured, transparent workflow. Now they receive work orders through iiQ, which makes it much simpler to set priorities, manage stakeholder expectations, and ensure projects stay on track.
With many of Henderson Collegiate’s fundamental IT and facilities operations challenges in the rearview mirror, it is looking toward the future and at how it can continue reducing inefficiencies and working smarter with what it has. iiQ’s data-rich, dynamic dashboards play a key role in roadmap development, providing Bush with a complete picture of performance and ticket trends. He can use these insights to garner administrative support, make informed decisions, and keep things running smoothly behind the scenes, creating an environment where educators can teach without distraction and well-supported students can thrive. “If I say, ‘Hey, this is a problem,’ they’re going to look at me and say, ‘Show me the data,’” explained Bush. “And Incident IQ is my data.”