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