Help Desk Management

With IT playing a very crucial role in an organization, it's high time you take your support infrastructure seriously. We will take you through a few prerequisites and tools to help you make your help desk more efficient

Saturday, March 01, 2008

Today organizations are becoming more and more dependent on IT, so there is an increasing demand of having better systems in place so as to manage IT and leverage maximum benefits out of it. For any IT management strategy to be successful it needs to have very good service delivery capability, ie, it should be able to handle service requests minus any delays. For enabling such prompt service delivery capability, an organization needs to have a very strong help desk in place. A help desk provides the necessary backbone for an organization to resolve user queries and problems at a much faster rate so that business doesn't get affected. Through help desk, problems are reported, managed, and then appropriately resolved within a stipulated time period. Help can be utilized by both internal and external clients to get clarifications on the problems faced in their routine tasks, which in return affects the overall employee productivity. A major advantage with help desk is the fact that it's a single point of contact for customers and service technicians.

At the inception of help desk, telephone was the main medium of communication, but with the emergence of Internet, services went online and many issues could be resolved remotely without the need of a help desk person actually coming to the user to check the problem. There are a myriad of help desk tools and technologies available to handle the service request from user, but what many organizations lack today are the inhouse skills and resources to successfully deploy them and utilize the maximum benefits out of them. So most often then not one could find a help desk person in distinct disadvantage trying to properly identify and understand the problem to resolve the issue. Now if the help desk people themselves aren't able to understand the problem then there is a serious risk that they won't be able to come out with the solution in quick time. Hence it's often observed that many organizations opt to outsource specific part of their IT operation to more third parties who have expertise in that domain. So, if one is facing an issue with help desk management, they outsource it to a third party that is better equipped to handle it.

But invariably it has been seen that even the third party faces similar challenges if not more as the organization.

To resolve such problems, new gen of help desk automation and management solutions are emerging, which can help organizations of all sizes to deliver better quality of support to their end users. These solutions are versatile in terms of their capabilities and are easier to deploy and manage. In this story we mention some of these solutions which will help to build a better help desk for your end user and at the same time will touch upon some of the critical components one must consider while deploying their help desk. That's not all we will also tell you what is meant by ITIL ready and what are the automation tools that are available, to make your help desk among the best ones.

A Typical Help Desk Mgmt Solution

Types of help desk
There are different ways to provide help desk facilities within an organization, it's up to an organization to decide what suits them best. An organization can either opt to go for a centralized help desk or can even opt for decentralized one, depending on their requirement. A centralized help desk would support all users within the organization, regardless of their geographic location whereas a decentralized one would have several help desks located at various locations where support is needed. The advantage of having a centralized system in place is that fewer resources are required which ultimately reduces the training, equipment, and facility cost. Also the management can get a consolidated overview of the entire system. Ideally for a centralized help desk you would need a telephone system with tools like Interactive Voice Response, Automatic call distribution, computer-telephony Integration to receive incoming calls. You would also need an email account for receiving email calls from sender and also to respond back to them. Last but not the least you would need tools or solutions that will support the service desk processes like call logging, monitoring, reporting, and so on.

When it comes to the decentralized option the biggest advantage would be the fact that it is location specific and handles lesser number of people, ensuring more attention to any problem. It also allows help desk stuff to develop deeper level of expertise specific to that location. Another advantage is that each help desk can provide backup to other help desks located somewhere else in case of some disaster or breakdown. As the service would be distributed it means larger pool of talent to draw from in case there is a requirement in some other location at a critical point. It is possible that organizations use different tools or solutions for different locations; however it is recommended that the same basic set of tools or solutions be used by all help desks which are distributed across different locations in order to facilitate contingency arrangements whereby one location can temporarily take on the work of another location in event of disaster or critical breakdown.

In Mojo help desk, you can easily check what all tickets have been generated, how critical is it, to whom those tickets have been assigned, when was it created, and so on

There is another type of help desk that is gaining popularity these days which is called the Virtual help desk, where the physical or geographical location of the help desk is immaterial. The virtual help desk uses the best of both worlds, ie, it combines the elements of both centralized and decentralized help desk in which user utilizes a consistent route to access the help desk, but their call can be routed via any location depending on factors like call traffic load, time of the day, closer locations, availability of help desk person, etc.

Components of a help desk
There are several tasks that help desk needs to perform; some of the critical management tasks include:
Incident Management-main role of incident management is to restore a normal service operation as quickly as possible and to minimize the impact on business operations, ensuring that the best possible levels of service quality and availability are maintained.

Change Management-Main role of change mgmt is to ensure that a standard method and procedure are in place for efficient and prompt handling of all changes to controlled IT infrastructure, so as to minimize the number and impact of any related incident upon service.

Configuration Management-The main role is to track and control changes in software or configurations. CM can be used to store corporate hardware and software asset details and dependencies. It can be scheduled to automatically synchronize with third party asset discovery and mgmt tools making sure that help desk stuff have all updated infrastructure information when working on the support issue.

Spiceworks regularly monitors for events and as soon as event occurs adminstrator is notified and a graphical form of the report is generated for better analysis of the events

Asset management-Asset management helps to keep track all the assets within the organization and helps to reduce infrastructure costs and also increase staff efficiency. It also makes the organization future ready as it will have a record of how many business critical applications do IT actually support and how they can use them to the optimum level.

Release Management-The goal of release management is to allow easy introduction of software and hardware releases into managed IT environment. It works in close proximity with Change and Configuration management to ensure that any changes to the IT infrastructure are deployed in a secure, managed roll out.

Availability Management-The main role of availability mgmt to handle the routine risk to availability is taken into account and that overall IT infrastructure and IT services are sufficient. They mainly focus on two distinct areas: first the new IT services and second the existing IT services.

Service Level Management-It manages IT services via a process of definition, agreement operation measurement and review. Right from defining IT services for the organization and establishing service level agreement (SLAs) for them, Service mgmt covers all.

Security Management -the basis of security mgmt is information protection. Its main objective is to protect information. While protecting the information is the value of the information that has to be protected. These values of the information are predetermined by the confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Tasks to be addressed
Probably, the most important task that help desk should address is to manage resources on a daily basis, they should make sure they monitor and keep a track of call volumes and numbers as well as the skill level of the staff. Help desk should on a regular basis communicate with their customers in both proactive and reactive manner. They should provide info and control required by other service mgmt functions and manage interface between help desk and other service mgmt functions. Managing cost is another important factor that should be recorded and tracked so as to make sure help desk don't go over budget and are recovering the cost. Help desk should always maintain all reports required by mgmt. All these are primary roles of a
help desk and should be done with minimum fuss.

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