Service Desk Performance - What's Missing?

From my IT Service and ITIL Coaching work with many clients over the last 10 years, I can easily site the following 'top 5' challenges and 'missing' solution components that I have seen time and time again: -

• Suitably Skilled and Experienced Service Desk Staff
• Pro-active and Pragmatic Second Line Support Teams
• Demand Management and Workload Forecasting Functionality
• Clear, at-a-glance, heads-up summaries - for all 'open items'
• Sound Workflow Linked to CMDB Information

I appreciate that bullet points [1] and [2] above are not strictly 'tooling' functionality, but they are essential solution components that are required to drive Service Desk efficiency and therefore help improve business efficiency.

Here are some observations to help drive efficiency for each of the challenges...

1. Suitably Skilled and Experienced Service Desk Staff.

* Thorough induction and education program on joining
* Appropriate ITIL Training such as ITIL Foundation
* Performance goals, measurements and feedback

2. Pro-active, pragmatic second line support teams.

* Ensure that 'bottlenecks', delays and un-helpful second line support personnel are removed/re-educated to provide maximum real-time assistance for the front line service desk team

* Instill quality reporting on 'what really matters', but from an end-to-end customer perspective, for example measure 'mean time to closure' for tickets and then focus *hard* on reducing this over time.

3. Demand Management and Forecasting Functionality.

* Implement true workload and demand management functionality, based on historical data, to predict the organizational workload currently placed on various people and teams. For example - at any given time, how many incidents require effort - and so - how many resources should be made available to protect/meet SLA's in this process area.

4. Clear, at-a-glance, heads-up summary of all open items.

* Solutions should provide real-time, at a glance, displays of all appropriate items such as #incidents, #problems, #requests, #changes etc. Not just the volumes and current status - but how long is left before a pre-defined internal check-point is going to be breached. Those approaching pre-defined SLA targets must be re-prioritised and action taken to avoid failure.

5. Sound workflow linked to CMDB information - providing real-time information and an accurate service picture.

* This is perhaps the most under-used and ironically - the most challenging to set-up quickly; implement the Service Desk Solution to leverage the data available within the CMDB to provide real-time updates on the current and planned status of CI's that matter most to incident, service request, problem and change management.

Running through all of the above is the central theme of removing reliance on, and interventions by, human beings (the Service Desk team) and driving automation.

ITIL V3 provides some good approaches for delivering these types of improvements (within the Service Design and Continual Service Improvement books) but alas, I believe, even ITIL V3 is still lacking in the Service Desk tooling and solutions area.