I’m happy to say, that I’m back ))) Cannot promise to post weekly but will try not to disappear for years )))
Today I would like to describe IT structure in several dimensions and say several words how it operates. If you look at IT from organizational structure side – it can be presented somehow like this:
Some blocks are presented in every IT, all blocks can be outsources, some blocks are optional.
- IT Lead – is a person that is completely responsible for how IT operates. Commonly he or she is the employee, while other IT-staff can be outsourced.
- Help Desk – generally call center that is responsible for tickets registration from users and for solving simple tasks using standard practices and procedures. Usually they have quite wide permissions and can operate with users’ accounts. Therefore, they are the main target for social engineering, and must have good standards and regulations.
- Filed Support – provides remote and on-site customer support and services. They are typical engineers with local admin permissions solving users’ everyday issues and problems.
- System administrators – their field of responsibility is servers, local network, Internet, telephony.
- Developers – support and develop local IT-systems due to business needs and requirements.
Moreover, every employee of the IT-staff can take part in Business & IT projects in different roles.
Now let’s try to picture how IT looks from user’s point of view and how tickets are proceed.
The scheme is rather simple: all user requests are passed through single window and are registered in a service desk system. Then ticket goes down from level to level until it is solved. Then user is notified that his problem was resolved and usually offered to pass through customer satisfaction survey. Thus, IT gets users’ feedback and can improve its operations.
As in previous posts I have already described in details the management of development team, this time I’m going to concentrate on two first levels of IT support: Helpdesk and Field Support.
Before going forward it’s important to say about KPI. In the future I would dwell on KPI’s, how they are handled and calculated, but today I would only name them.
Main KPI’s for common Help Desk and Filed Support services can be divided into two groups: Quality metrics and Productivity metrics.
Quality metrics include the following KPIs:
- Time to resolve problems (SLA). The SLA is defined based on the urgency of the ticket.
- Customer satisfaction with Help Desk.
Productivity metric is:
- IT service availability.
It’s all for today, and in the following posts, I would continue to share my experience how to create and manage effective processes for Help Desk and Field Support groups.