Tracking jobs for a campus and multiple sites requires a strong organisation. Discover in this article tips and good practice to improve yourself inherited from Urbest experience.
Let’s summarise all the tasks related to maintenance and services that a supervisor has to look after for a campus:
- Maintenance, whether it’s in-house or with subcontractors
- Daily requests from teachers, security or the front desk, for example
- Compliance checks
- Events Planning
- IT-related jobs for computers, screens and others
Then begins the most critical phase: interacting with the service team to optimize workload distribution, seamlessly track progress, and ensure all tasks are completed on time.
Ultimately, to be efficient in service management for a campus, one can look at:
- Percentage of tasks resolved
- Time to solve (between the moment a task arises and the moment it’s resolved)
- Cost of jobs done
- Customer satisfaction (in this case, teachers and students)
- Time spent on jobs
With this framework in mind, we can now look at multiple problems that usually occur in education, reflecting some defaults or room for improvement.
1. Service requesters have no idea who to contact
On large university campuses, students and academic and administrative staff may struggle to identify the correct contact for raising a job request, whether they relate to maintenance, logistics, or other services.
This uncertainty often discourages people from communicating about issues or implies significant time loss with back-and-forth inefficient communication.
➡️ A centralized collaborative application allows users to submit their requests through a single portal, selecting the appropriate category, ensuring direct transmission to the relevant service.
2. Discrepancy between what service providers should do and what they actually do
Contracts with external service providers, such as maintenance or security services, involve regular site visits to get jobs done.
However, discrepancies may arise between contractual obligations and reality, with fewer visits than expected or overlooked tasks.
➡️ A collaborative application provides shared visibility of scheduled tasks, enabling campus managers and service providers to track planned interventions, document their execution, and ensure complete traceability of actions taken.
3. High turnover and lack of information in the absence of an employee
The maintenance and service sector within universities often experiences high employee turnover. It’s hard to find good technicians or replace an experienced person who knows the campus.
The absence or departure of a key employee can result in the loss of crucial information.
➡️ A collaborative application helps structure workloads, define clear processes for service requests, and generate automated reports.
Thus, even in cases of absence, recurring tasks are tracked, and new employees can quickly adapt by accessing intervention histories and established procedures.
4. Multiple interfaces without a consolidated view or reminders
Campus managers often juggle between multiple communication channels: emails, phone calls, text messages, paper documents, etc.
These broken workflows complicate task tracking and information consolidation.
➡️ A collaborative application centralizes all requests, scheduled jobs, and pending issues in a single location, providing a clear overview and automated reminders to ensure effective follow-up on pending actions.
5. Time lost in unnecessary on-site movements
On large campuses, frequent travel between desks and various buildings or classrooms can result in significant time loss for technical staff.
A mobile application allows technicians to access necessary information in real-time, receive instant alerts for new requests, and document their interventions directly in the field.
➡️ Mobility from smartphones reduces unnecessary travel and enhances operational efficiency.
6. Uncertainty about task completion
It is essential for campus managers to know whether assigned tasks have been properly completed. In addition, it is often a waste of time to chase people to confirm jobs have been done. Fortunately, the technology allows tasks tracking and personalised reminders.
A collaborative application with a ticketing system enables tracking of each request’s progress, notifications of updates, and the confidence that jobs are carried out according to expectations.
➡️ Collaborative task management software provides traceability, specific reminders and accountability of workers on their jobs.
7. Insufficient Preparation for Security Audits
As a place hosting a lot of people, universities undergo regular security audits.
Inadequate preparation can result in non-compliance issues potentially leading to severe constraints up to shutting down some buildings.
A collaborative application enables comprehensive documentation of all inspections and actions taken, facilitates the seamless sharing of relevant information with stakeholders, and ensures clear demonstration of compliance with regulatory requirements during audits.
This facilitates the process and reduces the associated stress.
➡️ By integrating a collaborative application, university campus managers can improve communication, optimize service management, and produce archives of operations, contributing to a more efficient and better-organized university environment.Check an example of high school using task management daily.
