Like so many across campus, including the Ross School of Business, the priority was the safety and well-being of their faculty, students, and staff, followed by their academic mission. Using those principles as a guide, the Ross IT team sprang into action to ensure that their community had the tools they needed to successfully continue teaching and learning.
Ross IT set up their faculty and staff to teach and work from their homes. They prioritized the addition of webcams and BlueJeans to the classrooms, created (and updated as new information became available) a Remote Access Resource Guide, added multiple training sessions on BlueJeans, Zoom, and Google Meet for faculty and staff, and set up and managed online BlueJeans gatherings for community information sharing.
They created a help “button” for faculty and staff that could be installed on university-issued machines that would send tickets directly into Ross IT tracking system and notify team members via their cell phones. This system replicated the assistance button located on all classroom PCs. To meet the demand and quickly respond, they added the softphone functionality to their phone system so that all desktop techs could answer calls at the same time while working remotely as well.
At the same time, Ross IT managed to move 90% of their IT personnel into home offices before the “Stay Home and Stay Safe” executive order was issued by the governor. Remarkably, they were able to maintain their standard of excellent service to the Ross community.
When they heard that their LSA neighbors were in need of equipment, Ross IT assisted by providing ten laptops to LSA Technology Services. The laptops enabled LSA LEOs to continue teaching their courses remotely.
Ross IT continues to train their community in remote teaching and working. To date, they have trained over 362 staff and faculty.
Learn more about the Ross School of Business pandemic response.
