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ITIL :: View topic - Help Desk transition to a help Service Desk
Posted: Tue Jul 14, 2009 3:43 am Post subject: Help Desk transition to a help Service Desk
This is my first posting on this site,
I presently i manage a service delivery department my responsibilities are break fix response, and call management of recent times the industry is demanding service desk deliverables at present the the call center/help desk
does the following.
Call Loging
incident management
SLA management
They do not provide first-line support
The next step should be first-line support what approach should I use definitely there would have to upgrade there skills technically.
Joined: Mar 04, 2008 Posts: 1883 Location: Newcastle-under-Lyme
Posted: Tue Jul 14, 2009 6:32 pm Post subject:
vman,
First line support of what? What capabilities will be included, what excluded?
What are your present support arrangements? capabilities? performance?
What will be the measurable benefits of this change? the costs?
What will be the workloads? Will your newly trained staff be fully occupied?
Will you need more staff to cope with longer call-times? Will that lead to savings in second line?
Whether you aim to resolve every incident on first call (not possible for most organizations) or none, is a decision to be made based on value and cost. The two extremes are unlikely to be best for most organizations, but pitching the target correctly is unique to all.
Analyse your calls and determine how each type could be dealt with on first line. You will soon begin to see which are practical. _________________ "Method goes far to prevent trouble in business: for it makes the task easy, hinders confusion, saves abundance of time, and instructs those that have business depending, both what to do and what to hope."
William Penn 1644-1718
Joined: Jan 03, 2007 Posts: 189 Location: Redmond, WA
Posted: Thu Jul 23, 2009 2:59 pm Post subject: Re: Help Desk transition to a help Service Desk
vman wrote:
This is my first posting on this site,
I presently i manage a service delivery department my responsibilities are break fix response, and call management of recent times the industry is demanding service desk deliverables at present the the call center/help desk
does the following.
Call Loging
incident management
SLA management
They do not provide first-line support
The next step should be first-line support what approach should I use definitely there would have to upgrade there skills technically.
As I understand it, you now have a log-it-and-flog-it (log the ticket and transfer it a support group if it isn't a super easy fix, like a password reset) Help Desk that doesn't perform in-depth analysis (or what you define as 1st Line support). Your question is to what elements of 1st Line support you should add to your Help Desk to make it a Service Desk.
If I am correct in assessing the situation, I believe that the concept of the Service Desk is misunderstood. A Service Desk can be an organization that does nothing than transfer tickets to the appropriate parties within the IT organization. The difference between a Help Desk and Service Desk is that users call a Help Desk when something is broken (break/fix only). They call a Service Desk for anything IT related. They need a new computer, call the Service Desk. Want to know if the systems will be available this weekend, call the Service Desk. Need a new application written, call the Service Desk. The Service Desk may be referring all of these requests to other parts of the IT organization (new computer->procurement, system availability->Change Manager, new app->Service Level Manager for negotiation).
Adding the ability to move some of the 1st Level Incident Management into the Help Desk doesn't make it a Service Desk, it just makes it better at what a Help Desk does: Address break/fix issues. To elevate it to a Service Desk, you need to have them be the single point of contact for everything IT for your organization's user community.
You may even consider expanding their role to include telephony, fax, and copier calls (again, not just break/fix, but anything related to those technologies).
It's not the depth to which the desk can fix things, it's the breadth of requests they are able to successfully handled without telling the user to call another party within the organization. This is what defines it as a Service Desk.
Thanks dboylan
Your feedback is valuable and i will be starting discussions with my team concerning this very same topic and this site has provided me with valuable information to properly evaluating our next step.
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