West Ada School District Takes Data-Driven Approach to Asset Management

Atlassian products are world-renowned for helping enterprise teams accomplish more, but they aren’t just for businesses. They also help school systems implement efficient processes, improve daily operations, and optimize the learning experience for students. 

West Ada School District was looking for a better way to track and manage student assets. The Idaho school district already used Jira Software and Jira Service Management, but they needed guidance on redesigning their resource tracking process and implementing Atlassian’s Assets. The West Ada team worked with Praecipio to harness Atlassian’s integration and automation capabilities to improve their asset management lifecycle and create a unified data ecosystem.

Like many organizations, West Ada struggled to keep track of their resources. They were managing their assets with Smartsheets, but the platform had limited space and made the process cumbersome. West Ada teams were also wasting time manually inputting asset data into disparate systems, which prevented them from making well-informed decisions and meeting parent and student expectations. 

Additionally, West Ada had no defined process for keeping track of student laptops. From when a laptop is purchased to when it’s received to who covers the costs if damages are incurred, a laptop’s lifecycle is anything but straightforward, especially when multiplied by thousands of students. 

The school district needed to establish an asset management process that reflected all stages and scenarios of a laptop’s lifecycle. They also needed a flexible and dynamic resource management platform that not only kept student data safe but also tightly integrated into their existing ecosystem. 

Enter Atlassian’s Assets. When leveraged with Jira Service Management, Assets helps organizations capture asset data in a centralized place and provides powerful insights that enable data-driven decision-making. 

Since West Ada already had an Atlassian footprint, using Assets to support their asset management strategy was a natural fit. The school district had previously tried implementing Assets, but they didn’t know how to take full advantage of the tool and integrate it with their other Atlassian tools. 

That’s where Praecipio came in. Praecipio provides Modern Service Management solutions to West Ada, so our team was already intimate with their Atlassian instance and knew the unique challenges the school district faced. 

West Ada used Jira Software and Jira Service Management to manage projects and other IT functions, but they needed Praecipio’s help connecting their different Atlassian tools. First, we helped them build a portal via Jira Service Management where parents could open a support ticket for a laptop without having to worry about sensitive data being compromised. 

Next, our team analyzed the school district’s asset data and helped define their asset management process. From there, we configured Assets with Jira Service Management to centralize support ticketing, standardize processes, and automate workflows. We also helped West Ada aggregate and organize data from their various Atlassian tools so they could have both big-picture and granular visibility of their assets. 

Adding Assets to its existing Atlassian ecosystem has helped West Ada School District improve its asset management lifecycle, enhance the user experience, and strengthen the connection between students, parents, and the school system. 

By automating the asset management process, teams no longer have to waste time managing resources in spreadsheets and now have access to accurate data. Combining these improvements with a streamlined process for managing laptops, West Ada could save thousands of dollars in lost equipment.

After experiencing the magic of Atlassian’s connected suite of tools, West Ada plans to scale the newly established service management practices to other areas of their organization. They aim to expand the Atlassian platform to support substitute teacher processes and leverage Assets to track other resources within the school system.