IT Manager's Handbook: Getting Your New Job Done (67 page)

•
Encourage your mobile users to report back to you on the things that work best and worst for them. Focus on addressing the items that work worst, and making sure that all users are aware of the things that work best.

•
Look to your software vendors for your most used in-house applications and see if they have a version to run on handheld platforms.

10.4 The Help Desk

Whether it goes by the name of Help Desk, Support Center, User Services, or a variety of other names, your IT department needs some kind of support organization to provide assistance to your user population—employees, clients, customers, or business partners.

In general, IT Help Desks are designed to be one-stop shopping for all computer-related requests. For many users, your support organization is the only interaction they will have with IT. For these users, the IT department is only as good as their last call to the Help Desk. Managing a Help Desk well is a difficult task but a task with key specific rewards:

•
The company will be able to see a visible portion of IT’s efforts.
Installing a new storage area network isn’t a trivial task, but users are generally only aware of results they can see; they see a whole new range of applications and features but generally don’t go and check out the shiny new hardware that you came in on the weekend to configure.

•
You get to help people.
IT departments in general, and Help Desks in particular, are service centers.

•
A well-run Help Desk can collect a multitude of data and metrics.
You will then be able to more clearly and concretely justify your need for manpower, budget, training, hardware, software—the types of resources you need—when budget time rolls around. You can quantify the Help Desk’s performance and how, for example, you can use the fact that it took, on average, 15 minutes to answer incoming calls to justify the hiring of three new analysts. In some cases, that data can be shared with various department heads so that they can identify how systems are being used, where training is needed, etc.

•
You get insight into the entire company.
IT’s support staff works with virtually every level of the company, from the loading dock to the CEO’s office. If building key relationships is one of your goals (and as an IT manager, it should be), you can’t ask for a better opportunity than running a Help Desk.

Typical Help Desk Activities

A Help Desk’s responsibilities can include:

•
Requests for new equipment

•
Password resets

•
Providing users with documentation and Web links

•
Requests for new IDs and setting up new employees

•
Coordinating the process and activities related to a new hire

•
Managing computer supplies (toner, DVDs, flash drives)

•
Installation and move requests

•
Taking the appropriate steps when an employee leaves the organization—recovering equipment, disabling accounts, etc.

•
Scheduling training

•
Tracking each request to make sure that it doesn’t fall into a black hole and that someone always has ownership

•
Generating reports for management on the types and volume of calls

•
Keeping current databases of users, inventory, etc.

•
Routing and coordinating requests with other IT groups (application development, operations, networking, etc.)

•
Maintaining a knowledge base of fixes and resolutions so that repeat problems can be addressed more quickly

•
Providing application support

•
Reporting and resolving hardware problems

•
Helping remote users with connectivity issues

Procedures

Analysts at the Help Desk need clear procedures for handling different call types. They should know how to route different types of calls, how to escalate, when to follow up, and so on. These procedures should include detailed contact information of various internal and external resources. If your company offers 24/7 support, contact information should include times when personnel from other departments will be available. Call tracking software, intranets, and so on, can aid in ensuring that procedures are followed. These procedures should also be shared with other departments within the company.

Escalating a Call

Escalating calls that are beyond the skills or authority of your Help Desk personnel is an important part of the Help Desk’s function and process.

Escalating a call occurs when an issue is too complex for first-level support. Many companies have several levels of support designed to have correctly skilled people taking the right calls. You don’t want your very technical people answering simple calls about how to use Windows, nor do you want your first-level personnel addressing system architecture calls.

Typically, Help Desks have three levels of support: Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3. Some have Tier 4. Each company defines the tiers to match their own processes, but the concept is the same: simple requests (password resets, etc.) are handled by Tier 1 and then the severity/complexity of the problem determines how far up the structure the problem is taken.

A call can also be escalated when the customer has an issue whose resolution requires more authority than the Help Desk person has. Approving a nonstandard request or addressing a security concern is an example of an issue a person further up the Help Desk ladder generally deals with. Similarly, a call may be escalated when the ticket has been open too long, as defined by the SLAs, or when the user is a VIP and should be getting extra attention.

In both types of situations, clear policies should be put in place so that personnel can know when and how to re-route the calls.

Access

The more a Help Desk analyst can do, the more effective she’ll be and the more likely she’ll be able to resolve a problem on that initial call. Consider giving your analysts various degrees of administrative access so that they can reset passwords, edit e-mail distribution lists, change access levels, see users' files or data, etc. Of course, this type of access has to be carefully considered first before it’s granted. Analysts should be made aware of the capabilities they have and warned about the privileges they have—that it must not be abused. They also need to be aware that special access means they can cause problems as easily as they can solve problems.

Various tools from software vendors allow you to delegate specific administrative tasks to the support staff without giving them the “keys to the kingdom.”

Self-Service

Today, every service-based organization is looking to allow its customer to perform some basic functions on their own (e.g., tracking their package at
www.fedex.com
) to avoid tying up support staff resources. The same expectations are true for Help Desk organizations.

IT has started to embrace and incorporate some self-service ideas to address Help Desk-type user needs. These self-service tools can be particularly helpful for those Help Desks that aren’t staffed 24/7. Some common self-service techniques that have been put into place include:

•
E-mailing requests to the Help Desk instead of talking to an analyst on the phone, or entering the request via an online portal

•
Allowing users to see the status of their tickets

•
Setting up knowledge bases for users to browse through on their own

•
Setting up online forms for common requests (supplies, moves, etc.)

•
Resetting their own password (although this is commonly implemented, there are security concerns that you should consider)

•
Allowing users to see what messages have been identified as spam if they are trying to track down an e-mail that hasn’t been delivered

•
Online forms to request file restores; these are then passed on to the backup software and the files can be restored without human intervention if the tape library has the proper tapes

As in other aspects of our society, some people are more comfortable with self-service, as it allows them to feel that they have more control and involvement. Others demand as much personal interaction as they can get. Self-service options shouldn’t be considered as a wholesale replacement for personal interaction or other existing methods. Instead, self-service should be thought of as one more tool in your toolbox.

Tools

Help Desk tools come in all shapes and sizes—
www.helpdesk.com
lists hundreds of different Help Desk software applications. Some common categories of tools include the following:

Call Tracking Software

Call tracking is a software category designed specifically for managing calls at call centers; this category includes more areas than just traditional corporate IT Help Desks. Prices range from free open source call tracking solutions to those that cost a few hundred thousand dollars. Because most offerings are licensed based on the number of concurrent users, however, the size of your staff may be the greatest factor in determining how much your implementation will cost.

In many companies, a user is required to go to a specific Web page to fill out an online form (usually referred to as a “trouble ticket”) to request assistance. Initially users resisted this process—many companies require a ticket for every task, including mundane tasks such as new paper for the network printer—but as the breadth and size of IT functions have increased, so has its need to be more formalized about handling the workload. Precisely in the same way that you as a project manager for your department should avoid “scope creep” (for a discussion, see the section
“Clearly Define the Project’s Objective and Scope to Avoid ‘Scope Creep’”
on
page 106
in
Chapter 4, Project Management
), you need to carefully manage and track the Help Desk’s activities and resources.

It is important that you educate users on the need to submit a ticket. Call centers and Help Desks can become overwhelmed quickly. One user’s “simple” request (“I just need access to the high-speed color printer this one time”) can balloon into work overload (four users in one afternoon each asking one tech for a different favor “just this once”) or can distract from a more important function (the backup did not run correctly and needs to be rerun).

Trouble tickets also provide not only traceability but documentation. Once a user submits a ticket requesting a particular action, his request has been put in writing. Because the request can be tracked by both the user and the call center, any further issues can be documented (“I asked for a new laptop six weeks ago.” “No, actually, you asked for it two weeks ago and the update on the ticket says it will be here Friday.”) For a more complete discussion of this topic, see the section
“Measuring the Help Desk Workload”
on
page 281
later in this chapter.

Also, all that work that was performed invisibly now gets shown under the spotlight of automatic record keeping. Trouble-ticket software allows you to tell the company that not only did your department upgrade everyone’s mobile phones and went to four client site problems, you also reset 37 passwords, replaced three stolen laptops, moved 15 users, handled 15 file-restore requests, etc.

Regardless of how a user contacts the Help Desk—phone, e-mail, or website—each contact is given a ticket number. All contacts are entered by Help Desk personnel into a tracking system that generates a ticket number for each item. The user is then given that number; both the caller and the Help Desk can then use it to reference the particular problem.

Because there are a surprisingly large number of offerings in this product area, a good resource to start narrowing your search is HDI, formerly known as the Help Desk Institute, (
www.thinkhdi.com
). This organization, which you may want to consider joining to keep abreast of developments in the area of support services, can be a good resource to learn about call tracking software offerings and other aspects of Help Desk operations. There are a variety of factors to consider when evaluating this category of software:

•
Ease of customization. Some packages can be customized using a point-and-click type interface, whereas others require scripting.

•
Client, server, and database platforms supported.

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Auto-escalation (e-mail, cell phone, alerting management, etc.).

•
Integration with your e-mail environment.

•
Ad hoc queries and reports; the ability to define and generate customized reports.

•
Integration with handheld devices to allow technicians to view/update tickets while away from their desks.

•
Access from a web browser. This could be helpful for technicians who work from non-supported platforms (e.g., Macintosh or Linux) or allow technicians to access the database from any workstation without having to install the full client software package.

•
Integration with third-party desktop management tools.

•
Integration with third-party knowledge base packages.

•
Ability to build an internal knowledge base of calls.