The Royal Opera House
Flexible Service Desk deployment to support internal IT team
London Covent Garden’s The Royal Opera House (ROH) needs little introduction. The world famous Opera house and performing arts venue produces performances from The Royal Opera and The Royal Ballet companies plus other high profile events. World renowned and cherished classics from La Boheme, La Traviata, The Nutcracker, Swan Lake and many more are performed at this beautiful world stage to hundreds of thousands of people each and every year. Events such as the BAFTA awards call for journalists to be connected online to send real time award winning news.
"Panoptics have been a breath of fresh air. Open, honest and flexible in their approach, they proactively made recommendations from the outset and worked very well alongside the ROH team. We were impressed by the quality of onsite services they delivered and professionalism which ensured we had clear visibility of success at any time."
Service Desk support guarantees a winning performance each and every time
Ensuring the ROH could continue providing its visitors with the quality of service they expect in todays’ increasingly connected world, the Royal Opera House IT team decided to carry out its largest IT overhaul and transformation in 16 years. Its Head of IT Operations Jason Oliver, engaged Panoptics to assist by providing business as usual Service Desk support for the duration of the tech rollout freeing his in-house team to deliver the project.
Technology plays a vital part in the smooth running of the ROH; right from the productions and ROH store to back office systems including finance, human resources and marketing to a busy online ticket booking system.
To upgrade the ageing data centre and desktop infrastructure, the ROH decided to deploy a range of solutions. Providing Service Desk support to ensure a seamless business as a usual function was paramount for the arts venue.
"We have some exciting future plans in the works for the Royal Opera House which has been made ever more possible with the strong foundation of a robust and reliable technical operation."
Service desk resourcing
A Panoptics team were brought in to focus on delivering day to day support from the outset. Time limitations kept a handover of knowledge to the necessary minimum as our technicians really did have to ‘hit the ground running’. The ROH were impressed with the speed at which we worked providing them with a quick turnaround.
Resourcing was planned around the number of IT incidents assuming a two contact point to one incident ratio. In actual fact there were nearly 4 contacts for each incident so the service had to capture this information and quickly adapt to business needs.
We deployed a Service Desk support team on site at The Royal Opera House and implemented our own separate telephony platform to take the strain from the venues’ technical department. Through close monitoring and measurement we quickly identified where the service was under strain and develop a joint plan to cope with the additional activity.
Growth of business relationship
As the project continued to run confidence in our service increased and ROH expanded their relationship with Panoptics by requesting additional service desk resources which we assigned to manage and reduce open call rates. The first project wave was completed in December 2014, we also provided a strategic technical operations plan to the ROH and were engaged for a second wave three months later to deliver service desk and onsite support resources.
Insight and Reporting
We were able to provide insight into the support process making tooling improvements and gave full clarity through accurate contact ratio reporting which wasn’t available previously. The in-house technical department were able to focus on the smooth and successful delivery of the upgrade transformation. Recommendations have been implemented benefitting the Royal Opera House IT team and staff members, some of whom spend time offsite and overseas for their work.
The Royal Opera House benefitted through working with Panoptics with improved tooling configurations, clarity into service desk requirements and gained access to highly skilled resources.