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2.7.08
Julianne Herts
News Editor
When students find problems with dorm buildings or facilities they submit service requests to the Residential Operations Center (ROC) and hope for the best. Students are not given any idea of when their request will be fulfilled, or any means to chart the ROC’s progress. That may soon change, however, as students and administrators are working together to improve service procedures.
Last fall a student review committee conducted a review of the ROC and Buildings and Grounds (B&G) Service Request Process. The committee, chaired by Alexandria Dempsey ’09, surveyed the student body to assess the perceived quality of service request response.
Dempsey reported in a memo that, “The results indicated that while most students were satisfied with the quality of service, over 60% of students indicated that they had to submit multiple requests. 48% of students had to submit three or more requests before their submission was processed. The results of this survey demonstrated that the biggest obstacles facing the service request process were speed and communication.”
Dempsey theorized that the faults in the student request procedure may be inherent to the complicated request system. As it now stands, students submit service requests to the Residential Operations Center (ROC), which is in charge of inputting the request onto a server called Facilities Focus. The Buildings and Grounds Department (B&G) checks the server for service requests and sends a representative to address the issue. If the service request concerns a problem inside a student’s room B&G officials enter the room, fix the problem, and lock the door behind them, leaving a notice indicating that they have stopped by. B&G officials communicate their progress to the RIC via Facilities Focus, but do not give students any updates. This means that students are not given any information between the time they submit a request to the ROC and the time they find a note on their door.
At the May 4 VSA meeting student representatives discussed the drawbacks to this system, noting that service requests can be delayed for a number of reasons. If the ROC has a backlog of requests, for instance, or if B&G officials need to wait for a new can of paint or new tools, it can mean a long and confusing wait for a student.
In order to address this problem Dempsey worked with the ROC and B&G administrators to make the service request process more transparent. They decided that Facilities Focus should be accessible to students, so that service requests can be submitted directly to B&G. Some members of the VSA Council expressed concern at the prospect of the ROC being removed from the service request procedure, indicating that the ROC keeps B&G in touch with students’ needs. There was a consensus however, that the procedure should be streamlined and that giving students access to Facilities Focus was the best way to do that.
These changes are being discussed with newly appointed Manager of Service Response for B&G Henry Williams, while the B&G department works to catch up on backlogged service requests and cover the technical aspects of a student-accessible Facilities Focus site.
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Alumnae/i posters are strongly encouraged to include their class year with their name. The maximum length for comments is approximately 100 words; longer responses should be submitted as letters to the editor to misc@vassar.edu. More information about our letters policy can be found on our Policies page.
