Do IT Helpdesks Evolve? How?
egrizzly
Member Posts: 532 ■■■■■□□□□□
One of my newer experiences in the past few years was to work in an IT helpdesk as it morphed from one stage to another.
I got hired into a company where the entire IT team was a bunch of different functional groups mixed up together. It included Infrastructure Support (e.g routers, servers, switches, e.t.c), Identity Management (e.g. creating and managing accounts in Active Directory), Help Desk, and Deskside/Onsite support. Members of that IT team participated in all of the above functions and no role was separate.
6 months after I joined the company a veteran IT manager was hired. First thing he did was to separate all those functions and tap a first-line manager to manage each functional group. There were now four groups that reported to him, the helpdesk being just one of them. My role at the helpdesk now merely involved taking inbound calls for general issues covering all the listed functional roles. Whatever we didn't resolve at the helpdesk we then passed over to either of any of those groups. Still, within the helpdesk, there was no formal organization. Everybody resolved issues from their own opinions and past experience.
A year later a small group was spun-off again from the helpdesk and was called the QA Team. Their role was simply to listen to the past helpdesk calls and grade that call using a documented process judging if the callers where greeted, assisted, or supported properly.
Next most noticeable change is that now, the helpdesk is having to use documented knowledge articles to resolve issues.
...ok, now, with all that said it certainly looks like our helpdesk changed from a particular configuration, to another, then another.
For the managers out there, is this a known fact in IT best-practice, that helpdesks do in fact evolve. If that is the case, for a company of 8000 employees what is the most ideal state of evolution a helpdesk should be in to be the most effective? Is there any documented model in IT best-practice that a helpdesk can follow to achieve this state?
I wanted to do some objective leg work and actually get an unbiased sense of whether this change in IT helpdesks is known to be repeated across companies all over the world and how to achieve it.
I got hired into a company where the entire IT team was a bunch of different functional groups mixed up together. It included Infrastructure Support (e.g routers, servers, switches, e.t.c), Identity Management (e.g. creating and managing accounts in Active Directory), Help Desk, and Deskside/Onsite support. Members of that IT team participated in all of the above functions and no role was separate.
6 months after I joined the company a veteran IT manager was hired. First thing he did was to separate all those functions and tap a first-line manager to manage each functional group. There were now four groups that reported to him, the helpdesk being just one of them. My role at the helpdesk now merely involved taking inbound calls for general issues covering all the listed functional roles. Whatever we didn't resolve at the helpdesk we then passed over to either of any of those groups. Still, within the helpdesk, there was no formal organization. Everybody resolved issues from their own opinions and past experience.
A year later a small group was spun-off again from the helpdesk and was called the QA Team. Their role was simply to listen to the past helpdesk calls and grade that call using a documented process judging if the callers where greeted, assisted, or supported properly.
Next most noticeable change is that now, the helpdesk is having to use documented knowledge articles to resolve issues.
...ok, now, with all that said it certainly looks like our helpdesk changed from a particular configuration, to another, then another.
For the managers out there, is this a known fact in IT best-practice, that helpdesks do in fact evolve. If that is the case, for a company of 8000 employees what is the most ideal state of evolution a helpdesk should be in to be the most effective? Is there any documented model in IT best-practice that a helpdesk can follow to achieve this state?
I wanted to do some objective leg work and actually get an unbiased sense of whether this change in IT helpdesks is known to be repeated across companies all over the world and how to achieve it.
B.Sc (Info. Systems), CISSP, CCNA, CCNP, Security+
Comments
Discipline in IT takes several forms, structured teams that specialize, a formal ticketing system, knowledge base articles and service-level agreements are all common ways of creating structure and discipline from those ad hoc teams.
The most common set of standards around this is called ITIL (there are others as well). None of the standards tell you how you should do something, only what you should be doing. So you should have a ticketing process, including defined ways of communicating with the customer and how often but ITIL won't tell you which tool to use or if emaill is better than a phone call, those are all highly organization dependent.
All of this is designed to ensure the services IT provides have a "quality" component. It's hard to measure quality, even harder when you're not thinking about adding it in from the start.
We had a guy come in, he split the Help Desk level 1 and 2 to 1 and 2, but one was enterprise application support and infrastructure. Guys like you would of been on the infrastructure side, more "techs" the other side was application support, how to use a system why it's behaving etc.
Then another manager came in and knocked that divide out and went back to 1 and 2.
QA was done by the managers, usually 3 calls a month to keep in your file. QA teams seems a little over the top but if the desk is that large maybe they need something like that....
In mature organizations you would find a mature Helpdesk. He happened to join an organization where there was no structure and he thinks that the Helpdesk evolved.
OP you need to open an ITIL book and read and try to implement some of the ITIL best practices.
However, these knowledge base solutions are increasing and I think when they get to 100% it will change the helpdesk into another state. It was a hunch however I figured to post it here to see if these changes belong to an already documented metamorphosis.
This is the best approach to large-ish companies in my experience as it only takes a situation when you lose a few IT staff with wide reaching skills and you suddenly have a near-impossible skill set to recruit for since these guys spanned multiple disciplines and had a bucketload of indocumented knowledge that kept them secure in their jobs.
I find the most effective approach for a manager to take in your sort of environment is to get a consultant in to review older tickets, look for trends (ie problems in the ITIL definition or areas you are weak in), look for areas of poor documentation and then create a requirement for the staff with the skills or knowledge to address these. This takes a big chunk out of your daily overhead of calls with time.
It also works very effectively to get a consultant to look at the documentation matrix that covers all aspects of all the systems you cover and generate a skills match for this matrix for the staff. Get the matches of staff with absent documentation and make it a formal part of their objectives to produce the documentation then have it all peer group reviewed so everyone knows about it and where to find it.
Keep this cloud based (passwords kept separately of course) and you have well on your way to providing a big part of the Business Continuity component for support too.
It is always disruptive for staff to have to surrender their knowledge this way and to become a small cog in a bigger machine, but from a management perspective it is essential to remove reliance on individuals and make IT part of a service. I don't like to diminish individuals but cannot allow them to become a risk of the success of the whole business function of IT.
That is probably the key difference on how a team leader or staff member would see the situation to how a manager would - the manager has to look after how IT performs for the business while a team leader has to look after their team and do what the manager tells them without worrying about the bigger picture.
High priority incidents will nearly always be escalated. For it to be a high priority it needs to have a high impact and severity. Usually this is a breakdown of an application, hosted service, network infrastructure etc. None of which a 1st line team will usually have the access required to fix
I thought you got a new job offer?
Why aren't you outta there?
:]
High impact/severity can also mean the CFO is having problems with his laptop 30 minutes before a presentation to a bank or hedge fund (or that the VP of Marketing can't find his crayons). What is "high" for impact or severity depends on the organization and industry.
I know in real life it can be different. I deal with one client, the service desk will always email direct if it's effecting a "vip" . Doesn't make a blind bit of difference to how I work on the incident though, as I'm often already juggling issues affecting multiple sites, multiple systems etc to a degree that one person with a title isn't going to be getting any extra attention because of it
Reminds me, everyone has to put in help desk tickets for IT service but Director level and above management is always except, drop everything and help them ticket or not. I recall seeing a job posting 6 months ago in my company, Senior Level IT position solely responsible for troubleshooting VP computer issues. Thanks but no thanks.
Do you think they will take any notice of someone about to leave the company? Save your breath and energy for your next employer.
But then you have the issue's of SLA's. If the SLA's are all focused on initial contact time, time to answer etc then you find that first time fix goes out the window as everyone worries about their call stats too much