Catholic Education Western Australia (CEWA) unifies student experience across 164 schools in Western Australia with Freshworks

About CEWA

Catholic Education Western Australia (CEWA) provides quality, faith-based learning, and teaching, with approximately 76,000 students at 164 schools and colleges across the state. With a focus on the development of the whole person - intellectual, spiritual, social, physical, and emotional development - Catholic Education is the state’s second-largest education sector, educating almost 20% of all school-aged children in Western Australia.

We spoke to Ben Beaton, Team Leader Digital Services and Partner Engagement at CEWA to understand more about the institution, their priorities and how IT plays a pivotal role in transforming the student experience.

Corporate governance-led transformation 

CEWA managed a network of 164 schools around Western Australia, all governed under one roof at Perth, Western Australia. Western Australia is a very large land mass, which meant that the 164 schools were spread far and wide, posing a challenge to streamline and manage them. The institution wanted to mitigate this and decided to move towards a more centralized approach of governance. 

In 2020, the organization pivoted and reformed itself under a corporate governance structure, meaning that the schools no longer had much autonomy and control at the local level. CEWA had to now centrally manage all the schools across Western Australia's land mass. In contrast, in the past, the schools would manage their own local identity from their local environment. To effectively undertake the transformation, CEWA needed the right tools and technology to foster collaboration and real-time communication.

Unifying the student experience across 164 schools in Western Australia

“CEWA is very much a people-focused organization, and our vision is around children and being child-focused and Christ-centered,” remarks Ben. And so everything the institution does, every decision it makes, every dollar spent, and every tool deployed is geared towards improving children's lives through their education by making the schools more successful. But delivering quality education is no mean feat. Ben says that CEWA wanted teachers to focus entirely on educating the students rather than worrying about internet connection or IT support. 

While enabling the school to deliver the highest quality of education was at the top of its priority list, CEWA also needed to look for tools that would enable it to manage all 164 schools centrally now that they have more control over what they do. The team realized the need to consolidate technologies across all its schools rather than having independent technological stacks at each school. The intention of doing this was to be able to oversee and measure performance, as well as be able to share best practices between schools and harness a more conducive learning environment. 

CEWA is a fairly small institution, and Ben remarks that they were cost-conscious while they didn't have a bottom line to chase. Unlike a commercial business, CEWA gets its income from the Federal state fund. Hence their primary objective is not profitability but to enhance end-user experience and ensure they have sufficient capacity to educate children in the region at their schools.  

Upgrading to a world-class right-sized ITSM tool 

CEWA had a legacy ITSM tool that was mostly email based and very rigid. The experience offered was impersonal for both the agents and end users. With its internal customers spread far and wide, the objective was to bring them all together on a common platform and enable better collaboration between agents and internal customers. The old tool also wasn't very helpful since it expected the stakeholders to be more tech-savvy, resulting in lower adoption rates. 

When the team started exploring alternatives for their next IT platform, they set a few must-have criteria. The platform should enable CEWA to offer a highly personalized experience, the tool should not be overly bloated or complex and be flexible enough to tailor it to their needs and be agile. CEWA also looked for a platform that had powered other similar educational institutions. After evaluating all the alternatives available, Freshservice was chosen based on product capabilities and roadmap, agility, clean UI, tool intuitiveness, simplicity, robust asset management capabilities, and providing impeccable price to value.

Streamlining the experience with Freshservice  

CEWA interacts with over 15000 internal customers, so they needed a new platform to cater to their diverse needs. CEWA collaborates very closely with other educational institutions like Catholic Education South Australia and Brisbane Catholic Education, among others, as well as many managed service providers that helped get insights on the service management best practices. The insights made it clear that those who used Freshservice had greater flexibility and were better equipped to deliver on their service desk priorities. With a lot of experience and best practices available, the Freshservice adoption was super easy, and the users had a great experience working with the agents. 

CEWA adopted a hybrid migration approach, whereby they archived a lot of historic tickets and migrated anything that was still live within the last 365 days onto Freshservice. Assets and associated information too were migrated to Freshservice using a similar multi-pronged approach. 

Here’s a quick snapshot of what CEWA was able to achieve with Freshservice: 

• Extensive automation to transform service delivery: Automation is a major focus for CEWA, something that the institution wants to mandate across as many processes as possible. The Workflow Automator has been extremely helpful in simplifying and eliminating the physical mundaneness of managing tickets for agents. By applying clearly defined tags to track status changes, CEWA has benefited immensely from instant updates to the stakeholders, making them know the ticket's progress on tap.

• Centrally record, track and manage incidents and change: With Freshservice, the IT team could go above and beyond to exceed the team’s expectations. Incidents were managed by predefined automated workflows, thereby improving resolution time and, in turn, agent productivity. As for change management, the Change Advisory Board manages the entire change management process through Freshservice. The tool is used to track change requests and monitor the changes upon implementation, and later down the line, start to report back on those requests. The new tool has enabled the institution to be more programmatic and strategic with its approach to change management. 

• Laying the foundation conducive to self-service: CEWA aims to drive self-serve extensively across their community. With a very small team working out of the office, CEWA wants to prioritize self-service in addition to automating as many processes as possible and reducing many manual steps. Processes such as staff on-boarding & off-boarding, student on-boarding & off-boarding, and start-of-the-year and end-of-the-year processes for over 75000 students are part of the initial priorities. Hence the service portal has been a huge part of this journey, and the IT team has also rewritten all of their Knowledge Base articles and service catalog based on what are the top 5, our top 10 common tickets to come through. 

• Onboarding, tracking, and managing assets across its lifecycle: CEWA was able to migrate all its assets from the legacy system to Freshservice. With the new tool, the institution manages and tracks assets such as computers across its lifetime on Freshservice Asset Management. They also use the Discovery Agent to track these assets and continuously update information about these machines in real-time. The Jamf app in Freshservice lets CEWA manage their Apple devices. With the unified asset management tool, CEWA can now easily assign issues to the right asset and tag it with the associated data. This gave a comprehensive view to track assets' performance, from repair and replacement until sunsetting the asset throughout its lifecycle.

• Leverage insights and improve service delivery across schools: While CEWA admits that these are early stages with analytics, the team has started proceedings by creating team-specific dashboards. Each team leader has visibility over their agents. For example, the networks, security, systems, and business apps teams have access to their dedicated dashboards. These dashboards have been tailored to track specific KPIs identified by the team leads. This helps them gauge how each of the departments is doing across schools and what are the performance improvements trending towards while looking at constantly improving the service quality. The IT team at CEWA also presents a leadership dashboard that showcases the progress of service delivery standards and SLA adherence, among other metrics, to its leaders. 

• Unifying the contract management process across the organization: CEWA has begun exploring contract management to understand how it can manage them. In its proposed plan, CEWA looks to maintain and manage all its contracts via Freshservice. This includes contracts with vendors & stakeholders, recording details about the terms, and tagging internal owners to respective departments. The intention is to help moderate access, and manage contracts just by those authorized while maintaining them centrally. The team also looks to set up triggers for events such as expiry and renewals to ensure the respective owners can track contracts and take requisite action.

Success and the way forward

Rationalizing the service management platform across member schools offered significant benefits to all stakeholders. Agent morale has improved significantly as they feel more informed, and the platform is agile to suit their needs, says Ben. Additionally, the new tool has made the entire process more transparent and has facilitated more meaningful conversations between agents and the stakeholders from schools. This has led to a lot of member schools demanding CEWA to help them implement Freshservice for their localized IT requirements, a great testament to the benefit the product has been able to deliver. 

As for its near term priorities, CEWA will be focusing on the overarching principles of automation and simplification. While the institution looks to drive many big bet projects, the primary focus is to streamline the experience across the organization by creating a consistent, seamless and perfect experience regardless of the school or department. CEWA also looks to extend the service management best practices across multiple departments, and each of the 164 schools, with a mission to have one platform across all entities.