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Taking a Deeper Look at Pando - A Technician's Perspective

Taking a Deeper Look at Pando 

A Help Desk Technician's Perspective

Pando provides a lot of power to our help desk technicians in performing their duties. Our district has two, full-time employees servicing almost 4,200 devices. Every student, and WWPS employee has a Chromebook device. These devices are taken home by our students, and all of our employees; one can imagine the amount of wear and tear inflicted on the devices. Our district is considered a self-maintainer shop, and we do all of the hardware repairs.

The process for submitting a help desk ticket is a little different for our students and our employees. Our employees submit a help desk ticket via Aspen, and our students drop off their Chromebook in their school's main office. The secretary submits the help desk ticket in Aspen on behalf of the student. The illustration below is the simple help desk form that we use to begin the process.

Submission Form in Aspen

Once the ticket is submitted in Aspen it gets collected into Pando (Aspen's Help Desk Ticketing System & Knowledge Base Tool). The first step is for our technology team to review the ticket in the ticket log.

Pando Ticket Log
Members of our technology department triage the ticket, and assign it to the appropriate technician. Every activity associated with the ticket is tracked, and reported back to the ticket originator via an automated email message.  This process allows an efficient communication flow while the issue is being addressed.

Email to Help Desk Technician

The ticket is separated into two different sections. The top section of the ticket contains the context for the ticket. Details regarding the issue are explained in this section, and the ticket is assigned to a technician.

Top Section of Ticket
The ticket activity is displayed in the bottom section of the ticket. The ticket illustrated below displays three different members in the technology department participating in the ticket resolution. The ticket was submitted by Danya, and triaged by Deb. Initially the ticket was assigned to Lester, until Johnna assumed responsibility of the ticket. Johnna resolved the issue, identified the solution, and closed the ticket. As each solution was identified Danya (the originator) was given updates via an automated email generator.
Ticket Activity

Once the ticket issue has been resolved a ticket detail report is printed out, taped to the outside shell of the Chromebook, and returned to the originator. The originator has already been notified via email that the issue has been resolved, and they can expect the hardware soon. The printed ticket detail allows us to keep Chromebooks organized for the return to the student or employee.

Ticket Detail Report
Pando is a vital tool that the district uses to help organize our 1:1 Chromebook Initiative. 
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