Transforming Elgin Community College's Operations with Jira Service Management
Our client
Elgin Community College (ECC) is a fully accredited public institution serving students in the greater Chicago area. With multiple campuses and a wide range of degree, certificate, and continuing education programs, ECC provides high-quality, affordable education. Recognized for excellence and student success, ECC fosters a supportive community and state-of-the-art learning environment. When its legacy systems and siloed workflows created significant challenges, it prompted the college to seek a modern, centralized solution to enhance its service delivery and operational efficiency.
Challenge
Elgin Community College’s Information Technology (IT), Human Resources (HR), and other service teams faced inefficiencies due to fragmented systems and outdated processes. Across 21 departments, teams used a mix of software tools, spreadsheets, and manual workflows to manage tasks, resulting in duplicated efforts and disorganized operations. Without a centralized platform, providing leadership with accurate, real-time insights into ongoing work was nearly impossible.
These inefficiencies extended to several key areas. The onboarding process for new hires was manual and paper-intensive, requiring extensive coordination between HR, IT, and other supporting departments, which often caused delays. Task approval workflows were slow and prone to errors, with teams relying heavily on email and disconnected platforms.
Leadership recognized that these challenges were hindering ECC’s ability to deliver timely and effective services to faculty, staff, and students. They needed a comprehensive solution to unify systems, improve visibility, and streamline operations across departments.
Solution
To address these challenges, ECC partnered with Isos Technology to implement Jira Service Management (JSM) as a centralized platform for managing requests, resources, and workflows. The project began with an extensive three-week onsite discovery process. Isos worked closely with stakeholders from 21 departments to understand their unique workflows, pain points, and desired outcomes, ensuring the solution was tailored to ECC’s needs.
The implementation focused on building a unified service portal that served as a single point of access for requests across IT, HR, Distance Learning, Institutional Research, and non-IT analyst departments. Dynamic workflows and approval processes were designed to automate repetitive tasks and ensure that requests were routed to the appropriate teams. Sensitive HR workflows were secured using issue-level security to restrict access to confidential information.
To support ECC’s extensive resource management needs, Isos transitioned the college to JSM Premium, enabling the use of Assets to track hardware, software, and other resources. This functionality was key to automating complex processes like onboarding, where parent and child tickets were generated to manage tasks such as provisioning equipment, software access, and workspace setup.
"From the beginning, it was clear that Isos cared about our success and wanted us to have a tool that would help our teams better manage their work to efficiently and effectively serve our customers."
Managing Director of Enterprise Systems Applications and Project Management
Results
- Enhanced visibility: Leadership now has a real-time view of work across all departments, improving transparency and accountability.
- Improved collaboration: The centralized service portal fosters better communication between departments and reduces reliance on email.
- Streamlined onboarding: New hires benefit from a fully automated process that ensures all necessary tasks are completed before their start date.
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