Development Requests and Service Desk

[StaceyF]

At my company we have a problem where people call our helpdesk and request assistance on development servers or systems. We excalate these incidents and it drives the support partners crazy - often because the requestor articulates the problem like it's life or death and often it's after hours. According to the ITIL process how should these requests be handled?

Thanks!

[cysun]

Are the support partners external to your company or are they part of in internal team? You may sign a Operational Level Agreement (OLA) with the internal folks, or have an underpinning contract with the external folks to formally agree on what are acceptable terms and conditions on which you operate on, i.e. pre-agreed response times, operational hours, acceptable turnaround times for solutions, etc.

Problem Management is the process that I think this issue falls under. However, it seems like you need to categorise carefully the incident so that there will be some form of credibility between your company and your support partners. This will ensure that not every incident recorded by Service Desk falls under the "life or death" category, and the support partner can deal with the escalated incident according to the level of category set by Service Desk.

[jpomales]

The way I think this should be done is that the Service Desk will register the request as such (not as an Incident), prioritize and route. In my opinion, Problem Management need not be invoked. Remember that PM is involved in Root Cause Analysis and Known Errors. This is not the case if what the person is requesting is a code change. Now, if what the person is requesting affects the service he/she is using, then the request is entered as an Incident and could become a Problem if no Root Case is known.

After the request is registered and prioritized, the next logical step to take is to put it through the Change Management process for the proper evaluation. The Change Management process, through the Change Advisory Board, will perform the necessary evaluations including SLA's, OLA's, etc. Once it's approved it goes through the Release Management process.

I hope this helps.

Regards,
_________________
audentes fortuna juvat

[blamblam]

What is the priority of these Incidents? What the criteria that you are escalating them to your support partners? Your SLAs should reflect whether the affected system is a "life or death" situation, inside or outside of hours. Typically though, development systems do not carry as high a priority as production systems and as a result do not get the same level of attention.