City of Glasgow College and SCC

The situation

City of Glasgow College serves Scotland’s largest technological and professional skills sector. Two campuses host 32,500 students from 135 countries. The college’s IT desk system had evolved piecemeal. It was a manual operation supported by post-it notes, staff tracking requests informally, escalating issues by memory, often working at cross-purposes.

Students and staff submitted help requests and waited for resolution, with no visibility into progress or expected timescale. The system created frustration for users and created unnecessary complexity for the IT team.

What SCC did

SCC worked with the college to understand how requests actually flowed and where the biggest pain points were. Rather than imposing a standard helpdesk, they built a self-service model where students and staff could submit requests, track progress, and often resolve issues themselves.

The technical platform was ServiceNow, but the real work was designing the workflows and knowledge base. What issues could users solve themselves? What required IT intervention? How should information be structured so people could find answers? SCC built the platform and the processes around it.

What changed

The system went from chaotic to ordered. Students and staff could now submit requests, track what was happening, and know roughly when resolution would arrive. The IT team could see priorities clearly, plan work sensibly, and focus on complex issues rather than routine password resets.

Ticket volumes fell because many issues were resolved through self-service. Satisfaction improved because users had visibility and faster resolution. IT staff had more meaningful work.

What the client learned

City of Glasgow College learned that real change does not require new technology. It requires rethinking how work flows. By building a system that users could operate themselves and that gave the IT team visibility, the college created a virtuous cycle: better support led to better outcomes, which led to better adoption.