Running/Implementing a service desk
Does anyone have recommended books related to best practices of a service desk? How to implement them, recommended SLA's, staffing requirements, etc? Most of what I have seen is either not granular enough or very outdated.
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Slowhand
Mod Posts: 5,161 Mod
My best advice would be to do two things: revisit some of the material from your ITIL Foundations studying on the topics of incident response and problem resolution, then maybe go look at the forums for something like Zendesk or Spiceworks. There are tons of resources there for setting up the infrastructure to run a solid service desk.
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UncleB
Member Posts: 417
Does anyone have recommended books related to best practices of a service desk? How to implement them, recommended SLA's, staffing requirements, etc? Most of what I have seen is either not granular enough or very outdated.
There are are not going to be many books because every company is going to need a different implementation of the solution depending on their appetite, their budget and the technology requirements, so writing a guide for this is going to be like herding cats.
Even SLAs are very much down to the appetite of the management and business - do they care about your average response time, how many abandoned calls you have or your mean time between failures? Probably not all so you need to understand what they mean in terms the business will understand then ask them what they care about.
Essentially you need to play the part of business analyst to get the info and service delviery manager to communicate your plans it to them, take the feedback and present them with status reports on performance on a regular basis.
I've set up loads of service teams and fixed even more teams that were in a bad way and I can tell you there are no 2 companies the same.
If you want to drop me a PM I can share some thoughts based on your needs, but it is essential to realise what you think the business wants may be very different to what they actually care about so the soft skills to gather that info are your starting point.