How to improve your IT. Part 6 – Service Desk and ITSM
IT Service Desk
You can’t manage what you can’t measure
Service Desk
The IT Service Desk is the principal interface between IT and the business. The business mostly rates its IT experience based on the performance of the Service Desk. For IT, on the other hand, the Service Desk is the window into the business in terms of the number and nature of problems it is experiencing and how efficiently they are resolved.
The Service Desk is involved with critical Service Management processes and centrally manages the actual configuration of the service environment, (i.e., hardware and software components, including support contracts) together with SLAs. It operates best when it is based upon the Best practice IT standard of an ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) compliant Service Desk Application. There are a range of ITIL compliant applications available, overall, they dramatically improve and speed up the process of complaint to resolution, especially important when you have SLAs and performance metrics in place.
The ITIL solution provides an optional ITSM Service Management framework made up of processes, procedures, tasks and checklists. ITSM focuses on aligning IT services with the needs of the business and meets high-performance service management standards. It enforces the policing of Level 2 problem ticket resolution, is process-driven and provides a view of service management performance and integration across the whole of IT.
A Help Desk by way of comparison is tactical and reactive, using a basic call/issue logging application that creates a problem ticket and then passes the ticket to Level 2 support teams. Notification of completion of the problem closes the ticket. Focus is on short-term, immediate issues with problems being solved on a case-by-case basis. It operates on a break-fix model, is user-oriented and requires fewer resources to manage a relatively simple Help Desk Application. Policing that a ticket has been resolved however is not always enforced. It is not based on a Service Management Framework and does not integrate with other management processes like change or problem management also the Work Classification set-up sometimes suffers from poor definition and enforcement. The key performance measure for a help desk is the closure of completed tickets with descriptive cause and fix information, should the problem reoccur.
A properly established and well managed Service Desk is probably the most important of all IT functions as it has the capability to monitor and help manage all IT operational work (all work excluding projects).
It is the IT departments Workload Management monitor and should at any time be able to tell you for example what the top 10 business problems and top 10 business recurring problems are, yet 90% of Service Desks fail this test which is an indicator that the Service Desk is not well managed. A good Service Desk manager has the ability to identify where each IT teams problems are coming from and the team’s performance against metrics, therefore the Service Desk Manager is able to work with the IT teams to improve their work quality and efficiency.
The Service Desk owns the Workload Management process that controls all IT work (excluding projects). This process consists of Gating (work approval), Work Classifications (priority setting and allocation of work to Level 2 Support) and Management Reporting (performance of and tracking of work across IT Teams). This process makes all work visible, accounted for, prioritised, cost and reported on. Two of its other outcomes are that it stops work coming in through back door networks and it provides the Resource Management function with a sound information base, making it more accurate.
Gating is the process of registering and accepting work into IT. An essential element of the Gating process is the mandatory rule that ‘all work is registered (with the Service Desk) before work can commence. The benefits of this are it stops work coming in through the back door network, it stops the business bypassing priority setting rules, work is not lost, all work is trackable, and all work is charged to the correct cost centres. Gating helps to identify resource savings; facilitates accurate management reporting. and improves staff morale by helping to bring order to areas that are often chaotic, have high rates of rework and are subject to backlogs.
Work Classifications are used by the Service Desk to classify and prioritise all work as it is registered. They are then used by the different IT teams to manage incoming work according to its work queue and priority. Common work classifications across all IT teams are the preferred standard, however, given that the resolution times for Infrastructure and Applications Development work requests can vary significantly, different classifications may exist in this regard, otherwise, one scheme should apply to everyone.
Management Reporting is Performance Management reports that focus on Workload Management efficiency. They consist of predefined performance metrics that use work queue data to track team efficiencies. Metrics include such things as Completion Times (Actual), Turnaround times (Duration), Queue sizes (Backlogs) and Inter- team transfers (Hold-ups).
ITIL/ITSM (Information Technology Service Management)
The Best practice IT standard for Service Management is ITSM (Information Technology Service Management). ITSM is implemented under the Service Desk and affects multiple IT teams. ITIL and ITSM are UK government standards, now accepted as global standards, that are manifested in a library of books describing 'best practices' for delivering and managing IT service functions. The aim of ITSM is to facilitate improvements in efficiency and effectiveness in the provision of quality IT services within any organisation. While preferable, not every ITSM process (note ITSM is a set of processes, not software) needs to be implemented with only the critical processes really needing to be covered.
When fully implemented, ITSM looks like this:
ITSM within the Service Desk environment
Critical ITSM processes
1. Incident management: Resolves symptoms in the short term by providing a temporary workaround so that service availability is restored with minimal interruption. Incident Management and Service Request Management.
2. Problem management: Problem management solves the underlying root cause for an incident. Problem management will reduce the number of incidents by addressing the root causes of failure and minimize the impact of incidents.
3. Availability Management: Focuses on achieving and measuring the agreed availability levels for the services environment, including coordination of planned downtimes.
4. Change Management: Coordinates, prioritizes, authorizes, schedules resources for, and assesses the risk of changes. Change requests come in primarily via the Incident Management or Problem Management processes. Changes are typically required to effect required alterations to the existing environment to introduce a new component, modify or remove a current component, correct an error reported and diagnosed via Incident Management or Problem Management processes.
5. Capacity Management: Predicts capacity management that ensures that the business’ requirements for capacity and performance are being met. Needs to be integrated with the service desk (by assisting with the diagnosis of performance-related incidents and problems) and problem management in the resolution of capacity related issues. Requires a predictive capacity management function that ensures that the business’ requirements for capacity and performance are being met. Requires constant measurement, modelling, reporting along with the designing of services that meet service-level agreements (SLAs). Costs are reduced by using capacity more wisely and risk is reduced by the ability to manage periods of peak demand. Capacity management provides the IT department and business with control over how resources are being used and provides a consistent view of capacity utilisation of the available production potential.
6. Service Level Management. The goal of ITIL Service Level Management is to ensure that agreed levels of current IT services are provided, (SLAs) and future services can be delivered within agreed targets.
Non-critical ITSM processes
7. Supplier Management. Ensures that the organisation obtains value for money from suppliers and contracts.
8. Configuration Management System. A set of tools and data that is used for collecting, storing, managing, updating, analysing and presenting data about all configuration items and their relationships.
9. Escalation Management. Focuses on ensuring incidents or problems encountered within the services environment have the appropriate levels of visibility. Requires an escalation and communications plan and escalation closure criteria.
Service Desk Assessment
To carry out a Service Desk and ITSM Performance Assessment, download the Service Desk Assessment Worksheet here.
Next steps
1. Compile a list of Actions required to meet the Best practice IT standards.
2. Prioritise the work (Mandatory, Highly Desirable, Nice to Have) based on achieving the best customer satisfaction level outcomes first followed by work that will provide technical resource savings in the long term.
3. Look at the Actions list below for guidance.
4. Note that in the short-term additional resources will be required especially if there are large backlogs or large numbers of outstanding Priority 3’s.
Actions
The usual actions resulting from the assessment are:
1. Putting in place an end-to-end Workload Management process.
2. Enforcing the Gating rule of ‘All work must be registered before it is undertaken’.
3. Reducing the number of Work Queues.
4. Enforcing the capture of Cost Centres and Priorities.
5. Rationalising Work Classifications and remove redundancies.
6. Deleting Work Requests for older than 12 months.
7. Analysing with a view to deletion Work Requests older than 6 months.
8. Batching backlogged Work Requests and create projects.
9. Batching backlogged Priority 3’s and treat as Priority 2’s until cleared.
10. Putting in place either ITSM critical processes or in-house processes.