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
Helpdesk and ITAM tools – measuring effectiveness We talk a lot about using surveys to gauge customer satisfaction with the service provided by the IT support help desk. What we don’t talk about so much is how we involve the analysts in assessing the effectiveness of the tools that we provide them with. A post on this blog a … Continue reading Help Desk analysts – valued for their views?
ITSM and ITAM – why so separated? While some organizations are still struggling on with spreadsheets and clipboards, others have the vision to apply effort to continuously evolving their ITSM / ITAM processes. With each area of activity supported by its trade organizations, annual trade shows and conferences, I sometimes think we may be missing … Continue reading The help desk contribution to asset lifecycle management
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 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
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?
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
Who’s training who? After the fun and excitement of last week’s three-day HelpDesk and Issue Tracker training course in Las Vegas, it’s time to review the project and begin already to plan for the next. There is always scope to improve in the way the knowledge is delivered, practised and tested. Logistics of accommodation and … Continue reading Who learns the most in customer training sessions?
There is a great folklore that has built up of the weird and wonderful ‘issues’ that IT users bring to the attention of the help desk / service desk. There are some good examples listed here, and if you need a wry smile today, treat yourself to ten minutes scrolling through them. The hardest part … Continue reading Your IT Help Desk – it’s not meant to be a training resource!