Have you decided a PSA system is right for your district’s IT maintenance team? Here are a few steps to keep in mind when embarking on the implementation process.

Managing crucial educational IT functions with traditional, paper-based processes results in slow response times and a lack of organizational transparency. Given the growing role IT has come to play in the modern learning landscape, troubleshooting tech problems is no longer just an inconvenience — it can directly impact the academic performance of a student, a class, or even the entire school.

In order to reduce IT response times and gain visibility into project management, some districts have decided to deploy Professional Services Automation (PSA) software. A good PSA not only centralizes the whole set of tasks that have been passed along to an IT team, but allows you to measure the efficiency with which each of them is completed, introducing accountability into the IT maintenance process and ensuring projects are finished on time.

However, changing the technological backbone of your IT department isn’t something that should be attempted without a good deal of preparation. If you are considering a shift away from traditional, ticket-based systems and towards PSA software, here are several helpful tips to keep in mind.

Make Sure Every Stakeholder is on Board

PSA adoption is an institutional change. While it’s certainly true that most staff members within your district don’t know how IT maintenance is managed, the fact is that it directly impacts the work performed by practically everyone. As such, if they hope to effectively communicate why such major reform is needed, IT professionals should take special care to outline and explain the benefits of PSA software to a representative group of stakeholders. Have everyone in IT play a role in designing the process, schedule training sessions to familiarize educators and administrators, and express the value of the change to stakeholders in a way that will be easy for the layperson to understand.

Find the Software That’s Right for You

Not all PSA software was created equal, and some provide benefits and features that others don’t. Different IT departments will have to account for different needs and concerns of stakeholders in their districts — and thus, IT professionals must be willing to compromise with those outside their department from the outset. Prioritize the features that will be most crucial to efficient service and then focus on those specific areas of benefit when you make your pitch.

Create a Braintrust

PSA implementation is a marathon, not a sprint, and it takes a heightened level of commitment to make sure your system is integrated into your district tech stack properly. Given the number of systems and services that a PSA system touches, the installation process will be far more complicated than it would be for, say, a simple word processing software. It takes a concerted effort of multiple professionals to ensure it is done correctly, or it could create problems that might take additional months of work to correct.

To aid in the transition, create a braintrust of knowledgeable sources that can serve as experts to optimize and streamline your PSA’s implementation. Utilize your vendor’s dedicated onboarding teams, attend peer groups, and diligently manage the work of your IT team to ensure the installation procedure is closely followed. (This is exactly the sort of process that will be made much easier once you have a PSA in place!)

Establish Good Data Handling Practices

When you choose to implement a PSA system, it generally means you have to consolidate data from a multitude of sources, and that data is almost certainly less than perfect — much of it was likely produced by different systems, some of which may have failed to properly structure and clean it. Take the time on the front end to organize that data. Harmony PSA recommends that “for each major data set, appoint someone to consolidate and clean the data before loading.”

Once your data is clean and consolidated, adopt data maintenance processes and responsibilities. Communicate these new protocols to your team and ensure everyone sticks to them, or many of the benefits of your new PSA system will be weakened or even made irrelevant.

Demonstrate Value Early

IT will see the most immediate benefit of migrating to a PSA system, but to maintain the early buy-in you hopefully received at the outset, the IT team must show value in the short term to everyone involved in the process, including stakeholders, educators, and administrators. The first place most organizations see a return on investment is through the service desk. All parties involved can see an improvement in response time and reduction of system downtime.

Just as it’s wise to highlight the features of a PSA that stand to offer the greatest benefit to your district, be sure to emphasize to outside stakeholders the specific areas of the educational ecosystem that the system is demonstrably improving. Maintaining support of your initiative by highlighting the early wins will prove to be crucial to the successful rollout of your PSA in the long-term.