IT infrastructure management. . . We have often asked questions on this blog about the sequence in which the components of IT infrastructure management get assembled. For example, whether the IT asset database comes first, whether license or change management is the next essential item. These questions reflect what we find in our customer base, … Continue reading Business Process Management: foundation for IT infrastructure management
We were recently reviewing our investment options for our next business year. Having been lean enough to come through the crunch much better than many of our larger competitors, the discussion was proceeding along the lines of how to balance new spending on expanded development resource and expanded marketing and lead generation. Another option arose, … Continue reading Use the help desk to focus investment into your customers
IT help desks – opportunities for specialization Your IT help desk needs to meet all its SLAs, and excel in user feedback surveys, at the lowest possible staffing level. In the small to medium size organization, that probably means recruiting great quality support staff, all capable of dealing with any problems that the user community … Continue reading What-if? modelling on the HelpDesk
Help desk software – powerful business process automation? In the last six months, some of our more forward looking customers have begun to exploit their Vector HelpDesk implementations in new ways, totally outside their original scope. Our foundation Issue Tracker architecture is configured with ‘Project Templates’ which contain the workflows, notifications, tabbed views, etc, which … Continue reading Your IT help desk – a business process trailblazer?
Help desk automation – who benefits most? Many of our international customers have support centers in the UK, and from time to time we hear that the UK is experiencing a considerable backlash against call center automation. To callers, the automation appears to offer nothing except frustration and delay. A succession of multi-choice questions to … Continue reading The role of self-help in IT support
Help desk software – the RoI challenge With so many excellent choices in the market, it isn’t difficult to choose a good help desk software product. However, choosing a help desk solution that is going to maximize your return on the investment is not so easy. An RoI calculation has two components – the ‘R’ … Continue reading Help Desk investment economics
Key classes of requirement for a successful IT support and help desk solution These notes follow some discussions we held during our recent Las Vegas hosted Issue Tracker training sessions about the requirements for the ideal help desk. Three areas had surfaced – Reporting – key support metrics such as incident resolution times, analyst performance, SLA … Continue reading IT help desk software – its impact on support analyst performance
IT help desk software – essentials for the manager As a manager, you look to your help desk installation to provide you with actionable reporting that enables you to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of your support organization, while informing your management colleagues. You will need trend information, such as reductions or increases on average … Continue reading How does your IT Help Desk software motivate your support team?
This isn’t as simple a question as it might first seem. Let’s look at the issues which need to be factored in to your decision. IT help desk response times – average and worst case The number of check-out staff at the local supermarket varies throughout the day. Some marts will try hard to ensure … Continue reading Optimal staffing levels for the help desk
Help desk incident prioritization: the seat of the pants method In a 50 employee organization, prioritizing activity in response to IT incidents will fall to the single hard-pressed individual who keeps the organization’s IT running. If a decision has to be made on relative priorities between two or more open incidents, it will involve a … Continue reading Setting Incident Priorities on the Help Desk