Help Desk Management

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.

Some help desk solutions

Mojo help desk-This is a hosted help desk solution, which means you don't
have to spend money on hardware and worry about installing and maintaining the
help desk solution. However you need Internet connectivity at all times to
access Mojo help desk. Mojo help desk is simple to use, it took us less than 5
min to create our own help desk using Mojo services. It allows users to fully
customize their help desk including creating custom ticket fields. It provides
centralized ticket tracking services; users can log their complaints through its
Web interface as well as email and track their tickets online. It can notify
admins through email as soon as a new ticket is created; similarly users are
notified as soon their ticket is updated.

Mojo help desk has one unique feature called Mojo number which gives ratings
to help desk team and overall help desk performance. Once a customer closes the
request, Mojo help desk asks the user to rate the work done. A customer cannot
close a ticket without rating the service. Based on these ratings and time spent
on each ticket, Mojo calculates this number. As a result IT department gets
instant customer feedback and is aware of help desk performance at all times and
they can easily find out how to improve their customer services. Mojo help desk
service is available in four models depending on the needs, its free version is
also available while the Enterprise version costs USD99 per month. It can be
found at http://www.mojohelpdesk.com.

Spiceworks-It is a free IT mgmt solution with
easy to use and implement IT help desk. Other than IT help desk ticket mgmt, it
also has additional features like Network Inventory, monitoring, reporting, etc.
Spiceworks is simple to install and it has an intuitive easy to use Web
interface, which can be accessed through any Web browser.

Its inventory feature can gather all hardware and software information from
the network without any agents and automatically categorize them. It can also
retrieve information about licenses present, services, and patches applied on
each machine, etc. When logging a help desk ticket it can be attached to machine
on network, to provide instant inventory information about that machine. It
comes with 24 report templates which include reports on help desk tickets,
hardware and software inventory. You can also create custom reports and save
them as templates for future use. Spiceworks can also constantly monitor
machines in your network and alert you about potential issues like low disk
spaces, status of antivirus, critical service availability etc.

Installing Spiceworks is simple, it can work with Windows Vista, 2003 server,
and Windows XP. It can be downloaded from www.spiceworks.com. Once installed to
get started with asset management, click on Inventory tab on its main Web
interface. Now click on Start Scan option and choose scan whole network option.
It will start scanning your network for devices present which may take a while
depending on the size of your network. Once the scan is finished it will
automatically categorize the detected devices, ie, all servers detected will be
put in Servers category while all switches, routers detected will be put in
networking category. Now you can see overview of assets by going to overview
option in Environment summary pane. Later on when a new asset is added to
network, instead of doing the whole network scan again, you can manually add it.
To create inventory reports, go to Reports option on main Web interface.

Emails which have been sent to help desk, get converted into a ticket, with details about who is the customer, what's the request, and when was it generated

Now to create a report of all software running on workstations on your
network, select the template ' Applications by Computer' and click on the run
button at the bottom of Window. Now spiceworks will create an application
inventory report and display it. This report can also be imported to PDF, CSV,
and Excel format. Similarly you can also create other specific hardware and
software inventory reports.

HelpSpot-It is an Web-based help desk mgmt
solution. It provides email integration, ie, all emails coming to help desk are
automatically converted into help desk tickets. Users can also log tickets
through its Web interface and also access knowledgebase for resolutions of their
problems. It provides advanced reporting features, it comes with 15 report
templates including overall help desk's performance analysis. HelpSpot also lets
you create Automation rules for escalating requests, notify employees, send
alerts etc. In other features it supports Mobile access, Time tracking,
reporting tags etc. HelpSpot can be found at http://userscape.com and is priced
at USD 179 for one license.

How to use HelpSpot

HelpSpot can run on Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac and for database it requires SQL
Server 2000/2005, PosgreSQL 8, and MySQL. Installing HelpSpot is simple. After
installing it, to access its administration interface, open http://localhost/helpspot/admin.php
and log in with username and password provided during installation. Now you will
have HelpSpot's Workspace where your Inbox contains all tickets logged by the
employee. To assign a ticket, click on Take it button. This opens the ticket,
here you can see details of the problems submitted by the user. Now to assign
this ticket, from the Request Details menu, choose category of request and then
from Assigned To menu, select the name to whom you want to assign the ticket and
click on update request. Now the ticket will appear in My Queue option of
assigned user login. To create automation rules, click on the Admin button on
the main interface, click on Admin>Tools>Automation Rules. This will open Add an
Automation Rule window, here first provide the name for the rule. Next select a
condition, let's say if you are creating a rule according to email address, here
select Email, now select the condition two and provide the email address. Now
you can test this condition by clicking on Test Conditions button. Next you need
to define an action for this condition. For this from the Actions drop menu
select the action and fill rest of the details, eg, if you select Send email
notification to option, you will be asked to choose the member to whom email
should be sent, subject as well as email contents. Lastly, click on Add Rule to
create the rule.

To perform analysis on your help desk performance, click on Reports and go to
analysis and click on Speed resolution by status type. This option calculates
the average time taken to resolve tickets by their status type. On the new page
select the time for which you want to create and click on Run Report button.
Similarly you can do 80/20 Analysis, Speed to resolution by category/reporting
tag, etc.

Saurangshu Kanunjna and Swapnil Arora