"On the mistakes of others": what you need to know for the successful implementation of the Service Desk
One of the pillars of ITIL is the Service Desk, a single point of contact between the user and the service provider. Clients contact the dispatch service of Service Desk in case of incidents or problems and issues related to the service provided. The service registers, monitors and manages solutions to problems that have been brought to its attention.
Over the long history of ITIL, Service Desk has implemented many companies. Someone relied on ready-made tools, someone went his own way. Someone succeeded the first time, and someone "stuffed cones." The experience of the latter has helped us form a list of the most common mistakes in the implementation of the Service Desk - from the banal and easily fixed to the quite serious ones - which we share in this article.
/ Wikimedia / Anthony DeLorenzo / CC
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Linda Kirkpatrick, senior IT consultant at Flycast Partners, who has worked with more than 300 different companies, claims that many customers were simply not ready to implement ITSM tools. Or, in her words, “if I had been given a quarter of a dollar every time I started working with a company that was not ready to implement ITSM, now I could hire myself a senior IT service management consultant.”
Companies want a third-party partner to implement the Service Desk separately from other processes. As a result, organizations get an approach that is contrary to ITIL - instead of focusing on the service, there are scattered services that perform uncoordinated actions.
Decision. It is important to work closely with suppliers of ITSM tools and to have a holistic view of what is happening in the organization. The introduction of Service Desk should not be an end in itself, but part of a plan for the continuous improvement of services. To do this, the project team must work together with the company's employees, and they, in turn, must not only understand new policies and tools, but also understand how the whole process of providing services works. So the development of all services will move along a single course, which will provide a synergistic effect and harmonious work of tools.
The introduction of the Service Desk leads to major changes in the organization in terms of work culture. The staff does not always accept these changes painlessly. The principles of ITIL, implying a service approach, are not clear to everyone. This is confirmed by the discussion on Reddit , in which the head of the Help Desk service complained about his subordinates: they have no desire to learn, show initiative and ask for advice.
Transition to the professional Service Desk system may cause skepticism on the part of employees. This happened with the organizers of the event EuroJam - volunteers from the support service did not want to use the new tool.
There are several methods of reaction to the resistance of employees in such a situation: for example, ignoring, forcibly introducing or persuading subordinates of the benefits of the Service Desk. The first two methods, as a rule, do not give positive results - technically the Service Desk will be implemented, but in fact people will continue to resist innovation. If the opinion of employees is not taken into account, harmonious work will not work.
In the case of EuroJam, the problem was solved by the fact that innovations were introduced gradually and taking into account the specific features of the event - the management did not require to build the whole process “perfectly”. This also made it possible to simplify the implementation process - if you imagine a change in the form of several simple steps and adapt them to the features of the organization, the chance of successful completion of the process will be much higher. For example, at the end of the event, EuroJam volunteers literally became “Service Desk evangelists”.
The decision . Employees do not accept the new, because they do not see in it value for themselves. It is important to explain how the new support service will improve their performance. It is necessary to point out the existing problems and demonstrate how Service Desk will solve them and make life easier for the whole team.
Incident management directly depends on the ticket system. The main task of tickets is the management of all incoming requests. Because IT departments typically deal with a large number of requests, they need a system to manage the life cycle of each individual request — from generation to resolution. An effective ticket system allows you to solve all problems in a timely manner. It also facilitates the work of departments, since all information is stored in a single center for later use.
What happens when the ticket system is not built enough thoroughly, demonstrates the experience of the company Warfare Plugins, developer of plugins for WordPress. The company has established an incident management system to which user questions were directed. Simple requests could be served by all team members, and only one person was responsible for complex requests.
Once he had to leave for some time. Upon his return, he discovered a huge amount of accumulated tickets. As a result, the employee spent a month to correct the situation. This affected the average processing rate of a single request and, indirectly, the quality of the product: the tickets pointed out the flaws of the plug-ins that should be eliminated.
/ Wikimedia / Axel Boldt / CC
Decision. Having examined the mailbox, the team introduced a new rule - resolving any problem within an hour or two, even on weekends. This may seem trivial, but even at the implementation stage you should establish clear KPIs , among which must be the processing time of the ticket. You should also build a competent distribution of requests between competent employees so that the resolution of the incident does not depend on one person, and the amount of workload consistent with the capabilities of the departments.
ITIL assumes that each team and individual employee in a service-oriented system has a clear set of responsibilities and authorities. At the stage of implementation of the Service Desk, it is important to correctly assign the responsible roles. ITSM allows you to combine roles and areas of responsibility, but it is important to take into account the competence of employees.
Researchers from Kanazawa University (Japan), for example, write together with Chinese colleagues from Shanghai Wicresoft about how to implement Service Desk in Asian companies. They lead the case of one of the Chinese organizations, where, prior to the full implementation of the Service Desk, they used their own prototype incident management system.
The lack of understanding of competences and areas of responsibility led to the fact that simple requests were supported by the service by qualified engineers. The problem was that time for “expensive” specialists who had to break away from their core responsibilities was wasting time on solving “cheap” and “simple” questions.
The decision entailed not only the release of time from specialized specialists, but also an increase in other related indicators: satisfaction of VIP clients (which should have been done by more qualified employees) increased from 60 to 90%, the knowledge base was used several times more efficiently, decreased request processing time. That's just to restore order from chaos had to attract additional forces, and the whole process of "restructuring the Service Desk" took six months.
Decision. The introduction of automatic sorting of requests by complexity and focus during the implementation phase solves the problem of teams' workload. Automated monitoring tools ensure that all requests will be processed - regardless of complexity. And the creation of a knowledge base helps to accumulate answers to technical questions so that employees can solve simple problems in a regular mode, even if the necessary specialist is not in the workplace.
Of course, these are not all the problems that companies face when implementing the Service Desk. However, they are among the most "popular" and entail further difficulties. Therefore, here more than ever the opportunity to "learn from the mistakes of others" and to foresee such scenarios in advance is relevant.
Additional sources on the topic from our corporate blog:
Over the long history of ITIL, Service Desk has implemented many companies. Someone relied on ready-made tools, someone went his own way. Someone succeeded the first time, and someone "stuffed cones." The experience of the latter has helped us form a list of the most common mistakes in the implementation of the Service Desk - from the banal and easily fixed to the quite serious ones - which we share in this article.
/ Wikimedia / Anthony DeLorenzo / CC
')
1. Isolated implementation
Linda Kirkpatrick, senior IT consultant at Flycast Partners, who has worked with more than 300 different companies, claims that many customers were simply not ready to implement ITSM tools. Or, in her words, “if I had been given a quarter of a dollar every time I started working with a company that was not ready to implement ITSM, now I could hire myself a senior IT service management consultant.”
Companies want a third-party partner to implement the Service Desk separately from other processes. As a result, organizations get an approach that is contrary to ITIL - instead of focusing on the service, there are scattered services that perform uncoordinated actions.
Decision. It is important to work closely with suppliers of ITSM tools and to have a holistic view of what is happening in the organization. The introduction of Service Desk should not be an end in itself, but part of a plan for the continuous improvement of services. To do this, the project team must work together with the company's employees, and they, in turn, must not only understand new policies and tools, but also understand how the whole process of providing services works. So the development of all services will move along a single course, which will provide a synergistic effect and harmonious work of tools.
2. A waste of time for “war with employees”
The introduction of the Service Desk leads to major changes in the organization in terms of work culture. The staff does not always accept these changes painlessly. The principles of ITIL, implying a service approach, are not clear to everyone. This is confirmed by the discussion on Reddit , in which the head of the Help Desk service complained about his subordinates: they have no desire to learn, show initiative and ask for advice.
Transition to the professional Service Desk system may cause skepticism on the part of employees. This happened with the organizers of the event EuroJam - volunteers from the support service did not want to use the new tool.
There are several methods of reaction to the resistance of employees in such a situation: for example, ignoring, forcibly introducing or persuading subordinates of the benefits of the Service Desk. The first two methods, as a rule, do not give positive results - technically the Service Desk will be implemented, but in fact people will continue to resist innovation. If the opinion of employees is not taken into account, harmonious work will not work.
In the case of EuroJam, the problem was solved by the fact that innovations were introduced gradually and taking into account the specific features of the event - the management did not require to build the whole process “perfectly”. This also made it possible to simplify the implementation process - if you imagine a change in the form of several simple steps and adapt them to the features of the organization, the chance of successful completion of the process will be much higher. For example, at the end of the event, EuroJam volunteers literally became “Service Desk evangelists”.
The decision . Employees do not accept the new, because they do not see in it value for themselves. It is important to explain how the new support service will improve their performance. It is necessary to point out the existing problems and demonstrate how Service Desk will solve them and make life easier for the whole team.
3. Uneven load on employees
Incident management directly depends on the ticket system. The main task of tickets is the management of all incoming requests. Because IT departments typically deal with a large number of requests, they need a system to manage the life cycle of each individual request — from generation to resolution. An effective ticket system allows you to solve all problems in a timely manner. It also facilitates the work of departments, since all information is stored in a single center for later use.
What happens when the ticket system is not built enough thoroughly, demonstrates the experience of the company Warfare Plugins, developer of plugins for WordPress. The company has established an incident management system to which user questions were directed. Simple requests could be served by all team members, and only one person was responsible for complex requests.
Once he had to leave for some time. Upon his return, he discovered a huge amount of accumulated tickets. As a result, the employee spent a month to correct the situation. This affected the average processing rate of a single request and, indirectly, the quality of the product: the tickets pointed out the flaws of the plug-ins that should be eliminated.
/ Wikimedia / Axel Boldt / CC
Decision. Having examined the mailbox, the team introduced a new rule - resolving any problem within an hour or two, even on weekends. This may seem trivial, but even at the implementation stage you should establish clear KPIs , among which must be the processing time of the ticket. You should also build a competent distribution of requests between competent employees so that the resolution of the incident does not depend on one person, and the amount of workload consistent with the capabilities of the departments.
4. The lack of logic in the distribution of powers
ITIL assumes that each team and individual employee in a service-oriented system has a clear set of responsibilities and authorities. At the stage of implementation of the Service Desk, it is important to correctly assign the responsible roles. ITSM allows you to combine roles and areas of responsibility, but it is important to take into account the competence of employees.
Researchers from Kanazawa University (Japan), for example, write together with Chinese colleagues from Shanghai Wicresoft about how to implement Service Desk in Asian companies. They lead the case of one of the Chinese organizations, where, prior to the full implementation of the Service Desk, they used their own prototype incident management system.
The lack of understanding of competences and areas of responsibility led to the fact that simple requests were supported by the service by qualified engineers. The problem was that time for “expensive” specialists who had to break away from their core responsibilities was wasting time on solving “cheap” and “simple” questions.
The decision entailed not only the release of time from specialized specialists, but also an increase in other related indicators: satisfaction of VIP clients (which should have been done by more qualified employees) increased from 60 to 90%, the knowledge base was used several times more efficiently, decreased request processing time. That's just to restore order from chaos had to attract additional forces, and the whole process of "restructuring the Service Desk" took six months.
Decision. The introduction of automatic sorting of requests by complexity and focus during the implementation phase solves the problem of teams' workload. Automated monitoring tools ensure that all requests will be processed - regardless of complexity. And the creation of a knowledge base helps to accumulate answers to technical questions so that employees can solve simple problems in a regular mode, even if the necessary specialist is not in the workplace.
Of course, these are not all the problems that companies face when implementing the Service Desk. However, they are among the most "popular" and entail further difficulties. Therefore, here more than ever the opportunity to "learn from the mistakes of others" and to foresee such scenarios in advance is relevant.
Additional sources on the topic from our corporate blog:
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/345620/
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