Pima Community College

Download the Case Study
Industry
Higher Education
Location
USA
Challenges
  • Challenge 1: No communication system for outages across multiple campuses
  • Challenge 2: Staff and students learned of failures by hitting them firsthand
  • Challenge 3: Blanket alerts would be noise to campuses a problem never touched
  • Challenge 4: Scheduled maintenance arrived as a surprise, not a plan
Solution
  • Solution 1: A live status feed plus email and SMS for every system
  • Solution 2: Beacons focused on affected sites, so only impacted campuses are alerted
  • Solution 3: Year-ahead maintenance windows with two advance notifications each
  • Solution 4: Distributed ownership: network, infra, and app teams all push alerts

How Pima Community College keeps 31,000 students in the loop, monsoons and all

‍A multi-campus college cut mean time to resolution by 49% and gave its community one place to check, on Xurrent IMR.

When a network goes down at a college spread across Southern Arizona, the people who need to know are not in one building. They are students between classes on one campus, faculty mid-lecture on another, and an application team three sites over wondering if the problem is theirs. For a long time, Pima Community College had no good way to tell any of them what was happening.

The IT team could see the outage. Getting the word out was the hard part. So Pima built an incident communication strategy and put it on Xurrent IMR statuspage.

Results with Xurrent IMR

49%
decrease in mean time to resolution
60,000
notifications per month
3,300
status page subscribers

Subscriber capacity grew tenfold, giving 31,000 students and 3,000 staff a single source of truth.

‍
The challenge: an outage nobody could announce

Pima's IT team regularly dealt with outages, maintenance downtime, and weather disruptions across several campuses, with no way to tell anyone. When something broke, the people affected often found out by hitting the failure themselves.

"For outages, we didn't have any communication system in place. For maintenance patches, we'd let the application team know, but we weren't getting it out to the staff."

Wayne Wilson
IT Manager, Pima Community College

The solution: live status, plus alerts that know which campus

Pima moved forward with Xurrent IMR, and the rollout was quick. The platform uses beacons to connect internal and external systems and update the page in real time. The detail that matters most in Arizona is geographic: during monsoon season a storm can hit one side of town, so Pima focuses its beacons on the affected sites instead of alerting everyone.

"Monsoons can be focused on one side of town. With the platform, we're able to focus our beacons on the affected sites and alert only the campuses with an actual phone, power, or system issue."

Wayne Wilson
IT Manager, Pima Community College

Implementation was fast, too. “We were up and running within two weeks,” Wilson said, and Pima now maps maintenance windows a year ahead so staff can plan around them.

The result: faster resolution, a calmer community

Since the rollout, Pima has cut mean time to resolution by 49%, and its subscriber base has grown tenfold to 3,300 people. At peak the college sends as many as 60,000 notifications a month. Network, infrastructure, and application teams are all trained on the platform, so each can push alerts the moment an issue appears. That distributed ownership is what makes the speed possible.

At Glance

Metric Result
Mean time to resolution 49% decrease
Notifications per month Up to 60,000
Subscribers 3,300 (10x growth)
Community served 31,000 students · 3,000 staff
Targeted alerting By affected campus, monsoon-aware
Implementation time ~2 weeks

Get started with Xurrent today.

See how Xurrent IMR keeps your whole community informed and your IT team ahead of the next incident.