ARNe (Regis University Academic Research Network Enterprise), is the graduate student run and managed intranet which is organized as an IT company. The operating structure is based upon a Service Oriented Architecture where each student is involved in an operating portion of the network. New students participating in the SEAD practicum are required to work the ARNe help desk as a requirement of their project. They are expected to login to Track-It! on a daily basis and check for new tickets in the queue. The tickets are submitted by students as well as faculty. Without having a defined walk through on what the duties and responsibilities are required of working the help desk, transitioning students may not know what is expected of them. By creating a tiered escalation structure with set demarcations, students will be able to utilize a process flow and work the trouble tickets accordingly. My thesis is that by establishing a clear and concise help desk schedule and having processes for working, escalating and resolving Track-It tickets, the mean time to repair (MTTR) will decrease significantly which will increase the amount of work that the practicum participants can complete. Also, by running reports that look for trends on customer reported problems, processes and procedures can be developed which will help identify and resolve these issues in a timely manner. It is also hoped that by implementing a root cause analysis (RCA) tool, the likelihood of future occurrences can be minimized
