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This page contains answers to common
questions.
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The Service Desk is the heart of IT, this is your source for
information about how you are perceived by the user community. This is often
overlooked by the organization and is viewed as nothing more than a group of
glorified ticket takers. Many in IT share this same perception. These
perceptions are usually caused by experiences with poorly staffed, ill trained,
and poorly managed organizations. A well managed Service Desk will improve the
perception of IT by the organization. This is accomplished reducing
downtime, finding the root cause for issues, communicating accurately with
users, and providing timely, and professional service on a consistent basis.
Whether you have an IT staff of 1 or 1,000 you need to perform
this vital function, technology doesn't run itself. All Service Desk or Help
Desks perform the same basic functions, how can we leverage these to improve
service to company?
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What are you supporting?
Know the applications that you are
supporting, and gather documentation. Work with the other groups in IT to get
accurate documentation on systems, network, and application configurations. It
is a good idea to have your technical staff train the service desk on these
things and provide trouble shooting guides. Service Desk techs will use this
information if it is provided. |
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Build a workflow
Know how you want to handle work in the Service Desk, this
will include calls coming in both for working, and non working hours, it will
include various severity levels and how issues should be escalated. Follow
this link for a sample work flow diagram XXXXX. |
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Measure what you do
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Solve Rate - This rate is obtained through
calculation of tickets solved divided by tickets entered. |
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Call Abandon Rate - This will be obtained by
you PBX work with your telco administrator to get this data. |
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Average Speed of Answer - Once again get this
information from your telco administrator. |
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Quality Scoring - Record all quality scores,
these will be detailed later. |
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Number of Calls taken |
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Number of tickets opened |
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Quality Analysis
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Develop a quality monitoring form to review tickets, if a call
monitoring solution is available utilize it to find out what your techs are
saying to customers. Link will follow. |
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Utilize customer surveys to get feedback on tickets.
Calculate a customer satisfaction scored based on these surveys. Link will
follow. |
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Market the Service Desk
Publish your statistics and track your success, a graph showing
increased performance is worth a 1000 words! |
There are many open source tools available today that provide robust
network monitoring and are easy to configure. There is no reason why any size
organization can not have a proactive view into there environment.
The 2 most versatile "free" tools I have found are Nagios
www.nagios.org for network monitoring
and Cacti www.cacti.net for graphing.
Combined these 2 tools will give you a comprehensive view of your IT
infrastructure.
There are many user groups and "how to" documents available to help you
set up these tools. Also there are consulting services available that can
help you get these setup in such a way that you can maintain them
yourself going forward.
I have been in the IT industry for the last 20 years. I am
currently a Vice President of IS Support , managing technical resources in
support of 6,000+ users. I spent most of my career as a systems
administrator and network engineer. I have supported large VMS, Unix and
Windows systems, and have designed and implemented LAN and Wan networks
utilizing Cisco, Nortel, and Foundry networking products. Over the years I
had become increasingly frustrated seeing the same type of outages occurring
i.e. insufficient disk space, maxed out CPUs, Insufficient memory. I began
working on network monitoring tools, as a way to work more efficiently and
proactively.
Tooling however isn't enough, there are many human factors in IT
management that contribute to downtime, i.e. lack of change management, poor
communication with the business, lack of documentation, little or no
standards. I began reading about IT management techniques and came across
ITIL, FCAPS, MOF and other ways to deliver IT Services to the business.
There are structured methodologies to bring your IT organization under
control. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. I use a systematic approach
to tackle IT issues. Through the simple techniques listed on this site
you can begin to bring your IT organization under control.
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