From Spreadsheets to Probita: A School IT Manager's Story
Northgate International School is a mid-sized private school in Dubai operating two campuses with around 900 students and 120 staff. Like most schools of its size, it had built its IT management infrastructure incrementally over several years — a spreadsheet for assets here, a shared inbox for helpdesk there, a folder of PDFs for policies, a paper form for equipment handovers. By the time its IT manager, Khalid, joined in 2024, the system was a patchwork that worked well enough most of the time but failed reliably under pressure.
The breaking point came during the KHDA inspection preparation cycle. With two weeks to go, Khalid was asked to produce a complete asset register, a list of all staff who had not yet acknowledged the current Acceptable Use Policy, and a summary of IT support requests from the previous term. The asset register existed in three different Excel files that had never been fully reconciled. The policy acknowledgement record was a folder of email replies — searchable only by scrolling through hundreds of messages. The helpdesk summary did not exist because there was no helpdesk system; support had been managed through a shared inbox and WhatsApp.
Khalid spent four days preparing documentation for a two-hour inspection window. He merged the Excel files, identified 23 discrepancies between what the register said and what a physical audit found, cross-referenced email replies against the staff list and found 17 staff with no acknowledgement record, and manually compiled a list of issues he could remember handling from memory and email search. The inspection went reasonably well, but the experience was unsustainable. 'I was working until midnight for a week,' he said. 'And I still wasn't confident the numbers were right.'
Northgate implemented Probita at the start of the following academic year. The asset migration took three days — a physical audit to establish a baseline, bulk import into Probita and setup of the assignment workflows. The policy module was configured in half a day; all staff received notifications and 94% had acknowledged within two weeks. The helpdesk went live the same week; by the end of term, the team had handled 340 tickets with an average resolution time of 6.2 hours and a 97% SLA compliance rate.
When the next KHDA inspection cycle arrived, Khalid's preparation time was a morning. The asset register was current to within 48 hours. The policy compliance report showed 100% acknowledgement with timestamps for every staff member. The helpdesk report was generated automatically with a single click. 'The inspection team asked for the asset register and I had it on screen in about 30 seconds,' he said. 'That was a very different feeling from the year before.' Northgate's IT provision was rated as a strength in their subsequent inspection report.