Happy users, easy life · To be successful in keeping the business moving forward, you also need the right skills, ... Happy users, easy life. The Ultimate Guide to High Performance

Happy users, easy life

Edition 1 - November 2019

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The ultimate guide to high performance end user support

- By Pete Canavan

Happy users, easy life. The Ultimate Guide to High Performance End User Support

www.acora.com

I spent 13 years managing the support

of over 10,000 IT users at Santander

before I joined Acora in 2005.

A note from the author

Since then, I’ve worked with a wide variety of organisations focusing on helping them to improve their end user support functions, from specific project engagements to managing their whole service.

During this time, I’ve seen a lot of change in technology, ITIL best practice and what modern-day users expect from their IT service desk.

IT support is ever changing. With emerging tech like mobile, chat, cloud and more, helpdesks have never been under more pressure. I want to help ease that pressure by sharing what I’ve learned over the last two decades. This is a compilation of my top 20 tips, inspired by the most common questions I’m asked every day.

I hope you’ll find this a useful go-to guide and I welcome any questions about these topics or related IT support challenges you have.

Pete Canavan Support Services Director, Acora

Contact Number: +44 020 3974 8812 Email: [email protected] LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pete-canavan-18281a1/ Website: www.acora.com

Edition 1 - November 2019 2

About this guideHow well you support your users impacts productivity, the customer experience and your business advantage. For IT support to work, your analysts, users and management team need to be aligned. This in-depth guide is packed with practical tips you can implement to improve IT services while reducing your overall workload.

Technology is evolving fast. But it takes more than the latest infrastructure and tools to deliver a great service. To be successful in keeping the business moving forward, you also need the right skills, people and processes.

In this book, you’ll find what I’ve learned over two decades of solving IT support challenges for businesses that hinge on quality of service.

You’ll find sections on team management, user satisfaction, best practice processes and future trends.

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Happy users, easy life. The Ultimate Guide to High Performance End User Support Edition 1 - November 2019 3

Who is this for?Everyone in IT does support, whether they have a job title to match or not.

Whether you’re a seasoned IT leader or an analyst looking to take the next career step you need to be aware of the latest best practices and trends.

If you’re in a larger organisation with a support function under your remit, I hope you’ll dip in and pass this around to your colleagues.

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Section 1: How to manage your service desk team ......................................61.1 How to tackle the bad egg ............................................................................................................7

1.2 What makes a superstar IT service desk manager?....................................................................11

1.3 Why knowledge management systems fail and how to fix yours..............................................14

1.4 Turn your service desk into vendor management heroes..........................................................18

1.5 5 easy steps to tackle a mountain of aged tickets.......................................................................21

Section 2: How to delight your service desk users........................................242.1 Which metrics should your service desk measure?...................................................................25

2.2 First time fix - do your metrics reveal the truth?........................................................................29

2.3 The phone is not dead.................................................................................................................33

2.4 Creating an IT support SLA that actually works..........................................................................35

2.5 Improving customer satisfaction..................................................................................................38

2.6 How to better support a smaller IT user base............................................................................41

Section 3: Best practice and process tips.......................................................443.1 Password reset processes.............................................................................................................45

3.2 How to implement successful joiners and leavers processes....................................................48

3.3 Why your problem management process is failing and how to avoid major incidents...........51

3.4 How prepared are you for a major incident?..............................................................................54

3.5 How to improve your software asset management process.....................................................58

Section 4: Preparing your service desk for the future of IT...........................634.1 How to meet the support challenges of emerging technologies...............................................64

4.2 Windows 10 - How to support users during ongoing updates?................................................67

4.3 Five ways IT support will change in 2020...................................................................................69

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Table of contents


How to manage your service desk team

Section 1

In this section:

1.1 How to tackle the bad egg - page 7

1.2 What makes a superstar IT support desk manager? - page 11

1.3 Why knowledge management systems fail and how to fix yours - page 14

1.4 Turn your service desk into vendor management heroes - page 18

1.5 5 easy steps to tackle a mountain of aged tickets - page 21

Happy users, easy life. The Ultimate Guide to High Performance End User Support Edition 1 - November 2019

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6

Do you have a bad egg? Negativity is contagious. Having one team member consistently under-perform can have disastrous effects on everyone’s performance.

Creating the right processes and management style prevents the bad eggs from finding their way into your team - and helps you keep the good ones.

How to hire the right support service analystsAs the old adage says, prevention is better than cure. Having run successful IT support services teams for over 28 years, Acora has continued to sharpen our hiring strategy. By continually reviewing our hiring process we have a very high success rate in finding the right people from the get-go.

Here’s the three-step process that has become best practice in our own hiring method. I hope it will help you as you build your service desk team:

Telephone screening:You’ve whittled away at a stack of CVs in your inbox. You’re left with a big handful of candidates who, on paper, have all the right skills and experience. Bringing them all in for face-to-face interviews is time-consuming. As a busy IT manager, lengthy interviews slow down the hiring process and take you away from other duties. Even worse, you could miss some vital attributes that every analyst in your team should have.

Telephone screening is the most efficient way to reduce your shortlist. A quick call gives you the perfect opportunity to ask initial questions while you assess the candidate’s telephone manner. You’ll learn quickly whether each candidate can communicate with the clarity and confidence you need your team to convey.

1.1 How to tackle the bad egg

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Face-to-face interview & skill assessment:Now that you have a good quality shortlist of 3-5 candidates per role, it’s time to book in that face-to-face meeting. This is when you can ask more in-depth questions about experience and get a feel for the candidate’s personality and culture fit. It also gives the candidates a real sense of your business, your expectations and what they can expect from you as a manager.

However, discussion over a candidate’s experience doesn’t always reveal their aptitude. This is why we’ve adopted more objective practices, and as a result, seen huge benefits.

Introducing a proficiency test can be very revealing. Not only can it provide a clearer indication of an analyst’s knowledge and technical ability, but you’ll also see how they cope under pressure. We place our candidates in a series of ‘real world’ scenarios within our testing environment. They take a number of calls from a senior analyst or manager who requires technical support. This process is invaluable in establishing:

• End-to-end customer engagement.

• Responsiveness.

• Technical proficiency.

• Ticket recording quality. Naturally, your ticket logging toolset may not be what the candidate is used to. Yet certain essential practices (such as detailed troubleshooting steps) aren’t reliant on the technology at hand. Next, we assess each person for Telephone and Ticket Quality against our live service criteria. These results are then reviewed alongside interview notes to arrive at a decision.

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Introducing a proficiency test can be very revealing. Not only can it provide a clearer indication of an analyst’s knowledge and technical ability, but you’ll also see how they cope under pressure.


Onboarding and trainingNow you have selected the best person for the role, the management process gets into full swing. Setting out a clear onboarding and induction process is a great way to set goals, align expectations and give your new hire the tools to succeed. This is how to stop a good egg from going bad fast.

Consider if a one-size-fits-all training schedule will work for your all new IT support staff. By developing a framework, you’ll save time and help new team members hit the ground running. Your training schedule should align with the overall team objectives, SLAs and business goals. Having the training ready for new starters ahead of their first day helps set the standard early.

Having a new hire twiddling their thumbs can leave them frustrated and anxious. Start as you mean to go on by keeping them busy from the get-go. Nourish enthusiasm with the training and hands-on experience they need.

Do you know how long it takes to train a new member of staff in your team? Set a timeframe (e.g. three months depending on your own team and your joiner’s starting point) and ensure that they get very close support / mentoring until they are at the required level to pass their probation period. Catching potential problems early is key. During the training period, ensure new recruits have a one-to-one meeting on a weekly basis to make sure they are getting what they need from you and that they’re hitting their milestones.

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Retaining the good eggsYour new hire isn’t so new anymore. They’ve reached a point where they work relatively autonomously. They know your tools and processes well and are providing a good level of service. Fostering a strong team dynamic and culture certainly helps with retention. No analyst is an island, and after all, you’re running a team, not a coaching programme for one. Keep your finger on the pulse with what drives each individual, their personal goals, recent achievements, ideas and overall contribution to the team’s objectives.

I ensure regular one-to-one meetings, on at least a monthly basis. Allowing one-to-ones to lapse is a sure-fire way to make someone feel undervalued and lose motivation. If there are signs of underperformance, you can refer back to the KPIs that were set out in the very beginning. KPIs can evolve to keep a staff member striving to improve with core indicators tied to team objectives and one or two personal growth goals added on a quarterly basis.

Despite all the best planning, management skills and coaching you offer, there’s always a chance one bad egg will slip through the net. If this is the case, and you’re confident that you have delivered everything you can to help, it could be that it’s just not the right person for your team.

Despite your best efforts, sometimes things just don’t work out. Often these cases are not down to aptitude but attitude. A lack of motivation could, for example, indicate that an analyst has outgrown their role. After a year or two as an analyst, they may be looking for progression. If you can keep hold of a highly skilled person by giving them a more motivating challenge, then you could see things turn around.

If all else fails, you’ll have to make a tough decision. But make sure the rest of your team does not catch the bad egg contagion before you’ve dealt with it. Getting your hiring, training and management right means you’ll ensure only the best analysts join your team and nip any issues in the bud.

Setting out a clear onboarding and induction process is a great way to set goals, align expectations and give your new hire the tools to succeed. This is how to stop a good egg from going bad, fast.

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1.2 What makes a superstar IT service desk manager?Are you an IT Support Desk Manager? Or do you have one reporting to you? It’s no job for the faint-hearted. The pressure to perform to SLAs, to keep a team motivated and deliver a quality service for the user requires a unique set of skills and attributes.

I want to share with you the secrets of becoming a superstar IT Support Desk Manager so your whole team delivers the results your organisation expects.

Mastering motivationBeing a support desk analyst can be a stressful job. It requires a cool head, good customer service skills and problem-solving abilities. Since analysts are typically at an early stage in their career (and not the highest-paid people in the IT team) they need a great motivator to lead them. The ability to keep a team motivated under pressure is critical to success - and to support desk superstardom.

Mentorship, incentives and development will make your team feel valued and help you to identify strengths and weaknesses in each individual. Here are a few quick tips on motivating individuals and your team as a whole:

Conduct regular one-to-one meetings: It goes without saying that you’ll have regular team meetings. But one-to-one meetings give you and each team member a chance to air issues and give personalised feedback.

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Sit down with each team member at least once a month to discuss:

• Personal performance.

• Strengths and weaknesses.

• Personal goals and drivers.

• What each individual needs from you.

Even short one-to-ones make a big difference! It’s also a great way to help you spot talent and develop it. You might even find the next superstar IT Support Desk Manager in your midst.

Know the individual: Even if you have a large team, it’s important to know each member on a personal level. What are their interests, hobbies, likes and dislikes? It doesn’t take much time to find out a little about each person and it goes a long way to make them feel noticed and valued.

Support your team leaders: Team leaders are usually analysts that have been promoted internally. For many, it will be their first step into a management or supervisory role and they’ll go from being a peer in the team to someone that others should respect and take direction from. This can be a difficult change in their career so offer formal training to make their transition easier.

Incentives: Everyone feels happy once they are rewarded for their hard work. Small incentives and gestures can be one of many ways to keep your team motivated. It’s always good to organise a small budget for team-based activities when targets are met and exceeded. Company lunches, outings, and team building exercises can help your team to take some mind off their work in a relaxed and informal environment. It makes your staff feel appreciated and recognised for their group achievements.

One easy way to make your staff feel really appreciated is to focus on their personal achievements. Create a scoreboard for “targets met” or “exceeded” and share individual progress. To avoid it feeling like a public shaming, you can anonymise the results. Try using pseudonyms to maintain anonymity so that only each individual is aware of their own progress (e.g. using superhero names, Disney characters, etc.).

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Be the face of the deskThe Support Desk Manager needs to be the face of the desk, the voice of the user and a trusted leader - someone who can demonstrate the value of their team to the organisation.

This requires excellent customer relationship management (whether your customers are internal users or you’re an outsourced team). You’ll also need to interpret SLAs, service desk metrics and spot trends. Being highly organised with reporting and auditing is crucial to maintaining standards and steering your team.

Even the best Support Desk Managers and IT support teams will have difficult situations to handle. These can range from technical issues, problems in meeting SLAs, to a tricky customer or a high-level user. To be a true support desk superstar, you must balance empathy with a confidence in your abilities and a fair attitude. These qualities will help you manage internal or external conflicts as they arise.

To be a true Support desk Superstar, you must balance empathy with a confidence in your abilities and a fair attitude.

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1.3 Why knowledge management systems fail - and how to fix yoursGetting your Knowledge Management System up to scratch might feel daunting, but once you have the process underway, your time investment will be repaid tenfold. Read my tips for Knowledge Management success to get back on track today.

Knowledge Management should improve your IT support team’s ability to solve problems, evolve and adapt to changes such as staff turnover. A good Knowledge Management System (KMS) avoids the loss of critical knowledge when employees leave and enables efficient knowledge-sharing across teams.

It should also streamline processes by delivering relevant information ‘on demand’ to your IT Support staff. It can even give end users helpful guidance that reduces the demands on your IT service desk.

Unfortunately, Knowledge Management Systems are not always as successful as you’d hope. Why is it that so many organisations struggle to implement and maintain a successful system for sharing and maintaining IT knowledge? Over the years, I’ve witnessed just about every reason for Knowledge Management success and failure and want to share the most common problems and how to fix them with you.

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Why do Knowledge Management Systems fail?Do you have an IT Knowledge Management System that is being largely ignored? Does it take too long to find the right piece of information? Do you end up with irrelevant, or even zero, results when your analysts or users are hunting for help? One of the most common problems in Knowledge Management Systems is the same as many other business databases. There’s simply too much legacy information, duplication and (worst case scenario) even outright contradiction.

When it comes to creating a KMS, you’ll only get out what you put in… and what you put in, will at some point need to be removed or updated. Duplicate and legacy articles can send users down a rabbit hole of dissatisfaction and wasted time, the very opposite of what your KMS was set up to achieve. Lack of direction and ownership over article creation, maintenance and reporting can effectively leave your KMS redundant.

If you don’t already have a Knowledge Manager in your team, you need to decide who will take overall responsibility.

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How to achieve KMS excellence

Who’s responsible?If you don’t already have a Knowledge Manager in your team, you need to decide who will take overall responsibility. This could be a Team Leader or another knowledgeable team member that will oversee the process.

What does a KMS manager do?This individual will be the KMS champion, espousing its benefits while ensuring it is, in fact, beneficial. This designated resource will make sure that articles are being created, that they are vetted before publication and that targets are met. They’ll also manage ongoing quality management, KMS reporting and optimisation. It’s not this individual’s sole responsibility to create the content but it is their responsibility to ensure it’s happening.

Who creates the content?In a word, everyone. Your analysts should be writing the bulk of the content while more senior team members can help by checking and verifying content accuracy. The most successful systems are backed-up with individual and team targets to produce X number of articles.

The KMS Manager should be helping to set the priorities by looking at ticket trends so that the most frequently sought information is available as soon as possible. For example, if you’re rolling out any new IT implementations, this will be a priority. If you have a high frequency of a certain type of request, you can create an end user KMS that leads them on a path to self-service, thus freeing up analysts for incidents or complex requests.

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How to maintain a successful KMSHaving clearly defined roles for creation and management is a great starting point. To keep the database tidy and useful, it needs regular audits and maintenance. Each time an article is uploaded, ensure that a review date is set. This should be within one year but sooner if possible to keep up with the fast-paced world of IT.

Setting a review date that alerts the KMS manager ahead of time gives them the opportunity to task the review appropriately. The article can be updated if required, remain the same if not or if it has become completely obsolete, it should be removed entirely.

Tracking and measuring the success of each article to identify usefulness and future content priorities also have to fall under the remit of the KMS Manager. Even simple measurements such as hit rates can be informative but where possible, link articles to tickets for deeper insights.

An effective KMS is not a set-and-forget tool but an evolving shared brain for your IT team and users. It takes ongoing time and effort to keep it useful. But the benefits of a well-maintained system make it all worthwhile as it begins to save time and improve your team’s response times.

An effective KMS is not a set-and-forget tool but an evolving shared brain for your IT team and users.

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1.4 Turn your service desk into vendor management heroesHow many vendors does your IT function work with? How much of the vendor management process does your service desk handle?

Could you be more hands-on to improve performance? In my experience with service desks across the UK, the answer is usually yes!

Defining vendor management rolesThe vendor management process ensures your business receives value for money, that contracts are up to date and that you’re maintaining vendor records. Alongside that is the interface between your organisation and each supplier. While some of the high-level management might sit with specialists or a service management function, much of the day-to-day communication can fall into the service desk’s domain.

For successful vendor management, you need to have defined roles and responsibilities within your organisation. Your own ticket resolution countdown doesn’t start until you receive contact from a user. The same goes for your vendors. For this reason, I recommend your service desk takes on as much of the day-to-day escalation as possible. Minimising the layers from user to vendor will get those tickets moving faster.

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Tracking 3rd party ticketsIf your analyst, logging a supplier-related ticket, doesn’t feel accountable for the success of the vendor service, it is easy for escalated tickets to languish. It’s important that your service desk keeps track of tickets being passed to a 3rd party. Especially when a user’s productivity is at stake. Part of the escalation process must include a follow-up to ensure it gets resolved.

Leveraging vendor SLAsWith each vendor relationship, you should have a contract with a Service Level Agreement. Details such as how quickly you can expect a response and resolution can help you manage requests, problems and incidents.

This is another reason to ensure you track these tickets from the service desk. Your business can’t know if it is receiving value from a vendor without having detailed reporting to hand. You can look at trends in resolution rates and cross-check them against your contract. If you’ve had major incidents relating to a vendor service, the service desk reports are the first port of call for checking if an appropriate root cause analysis has been conducted.

Driving efficiency with shift-left principlesWith any 3rd party service, your own service desk can look for opportunities to take on more responsibility. Get your team skilled up so that your organisation has a more efficient service, no matter where the root cause lies. If you’re receiving high volumes of tickets relating to a particular vendor service, it works best if you can resolve them with your own 1st line or 2nd line support team.

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Vendors should be happy to help you with the tools to use this shift-left principle, including:

• Documentation for your Knowledge Management System.

• Training members of your service desk team.

• Agreeing on processes and ticket categorisation around escalations.

The most effective place to start is by solving service requests at your service desk whenever possible. This is easier to put in place than troubleshooting problems. It makes sense to bring vendor management into your joiners and leavers’ process.

Once you’ve implemented a more hands-on approach to vendor management at the service desk, you’ll start to see demonstrable results in your reporting. Soon, you’ll be able to show successes in the form of faster deployments, quicker resolutions and happier users.

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1.5 5 easy steps to tackle a mountain of aged ticketsAre you buried under a mound of aged tickets? As a manager of a high volume service desk, it’s easy to overlook or even turn a blind eye to ageing tickets. But deep down, you know that this will cause untold problems in the long run. The daily demand to keep your technology running smoothly can mean you miss the wood for the trees.

Ageing tickets can get stuck in limbo for a variety of reasons but in the end, they can bring down the perception of your team. You might deliver an excellent service 90% of the time, but it’s the other 10% that your users remember first.

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STEP 1: Reporting aged ticket volumesWe often meet with Support desk Managers that have limited reporting. The first step to managing aged tickets is to identify them. You have to get visibility. We propose a simple breakdown of volume over time. Look back over the past six months, chart how many tickets are:

• 1 week+ overdue

• 2 weeks+ overdue

• 3 weeks+ overdue

• ... and so on You should break this down month by month to see if your aged tickets are reducing or increasing. This initial analysis helps you identify basic trends before you move on to the next stage.

STEP 2: Support ticket categorisationsNow you know how many aged tickets you have, where are they coming from? Are they miscategorised? A common mistake is tickets getting marked as incidents when in reality they’re a development piece. Make sure these tickets have been passed along to the right people, followed up and categorised correctly. This simple step can deal with a big chunk of your ticket mountain.

The other issue with miscategorisation is that it can cause complacency. You might be assuming a bunch of aged tickets are mislabelled when, in fact, they need your attention.

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STEP 3: Analyse what’s leftNow you’ve dealt with the miscategorised tickets, you’ll have a smaller pile of ageing items left in your queue. You’ll likely find that a high percentage of what’s left is ‘waiting for a response from x’. These could be waiting for a response from a vendor, a user or another 3rd party.

It could be that some of these tickets have in fact been resolved already. If the ticket has disappeared from the view of your desk, it can sit around appearing unsolved when it might already be closed.

Another common theme is duplicate tickets. You might have had multiple tickets raised for the same request. It might have been resolved but only the most recent ticket got marked accordingly. Look out for patterns that flag a weakness in the team. You can uncover opportunities to improve your team’s structure, capacity or capabilities.

STEP 4: The cleanupNow you have the analysis, reshape your team so that one part is focusing on clearing the backlog while the rest maintains Business as Usual. This might involve drafting in extra resources from outside the team.

If your analysis highlighted skills-gaps or a particular piece of work that could fix multiple tickets at once, you can kill on ticket pile with one initiative. If you uncovered a patch of tickets that could all be resolved by one piece of work, set aside the time and resources for the fix.

STEP 5: Maintain your ticket queueClearing away that backlog might have seemed impossible at the start, but now you’re looking at a clean and tidy ticket queue it all feels worthwhile. Now you just need to make sure it stays this way. Continue the reporting discipline and repeat these steps each month. Instil a culture of proactivity around aged tickets, chasing up escalated tickets and looking for training opportunities. Once you’re in the habit of taking these steps, you’ll see the impact on user satisfaction and productivity across the business.

If you continue to follow these five simple steps, you should have no problem keeping up-to-date with future tickets.

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How to delight your service desk users

Section 2

In this section:

2.1 Which metrics should your service desk measure? - page 26

2.2 First time fix - do your metrics reveal the truth? - page 30

2.3 The phone is not dead - page 33

2.4 Creating an IT support sla that actually works - page 36

2.5 Improving customer satisfaction - page 38

2.6 How to better support a smaller IT user base - page 41


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2.1 Which metrics should your service desk measure?How do you know if your service desk is meeting your SLA? How do you identify training issues and threats to IT stability?

Keeping track of key metrics is the key to a smooth and successful IT Support desk but how do you know which numbers to focus on?

In this chapter, I’ll point you to the most important measurables among the sea of data.

Which metrics should your IT service desk be measuring?Everyone agrees that it’s important to track, measure and optimise your service desk. At Acora, we track our performance against the contractual measures and SLAs set out with our clients. We also conduct regular audits to ensure we’re meeting (or exceeding) our targets. If you run your own in-house service desk, you should treat it as if you were providing your service to a 3rd party client. If you already outsource your IT service desk, are you getting the right reporting that digs into the service you’re receiving? Or does it ignore critical issues?

Having KPIs is the first step, but how do you know what you should be measuring and by which methods? During the years I’ve spent managing and overseeing IT service desks, I’ve seen an array of metrics used. When you’re confronted with so many numbers, it’s easy to get data blindness. I want to delve into the most useful data and how to use it to analyse and optimise performance. Here are my top metrics for IT service desk excellence.

What you can learn from contact and ticket

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volumes?Many service desks will look at overall ticket count. At a glance, it is one of the easiest numbers to get an idea of throughput. Pulling a report on the number of tickets raised can give some insight but be careful- on its own, it can give a false impression. To get a true impression of ticket handling efficiency, you also need to look at the number of contacts made to the desk.

By looking at the volume of contacts into the desk, you’ll get more valuable insights. High contact to ticket ratios can suggest issues that require a deeper dive into your stats. A common reason for high contact to ticket ratios is users making multiple contacts to the desk to get a ticket resolved. Understanding this figure helps you identify training opportunities and inadequacies in your IT systems and infrastructure.

Service desk trendsDoes your service desk manage multiple locations? Breaking down your report by the origin of contacts and tickets helps to understand if there are location specific issues. You might also consider breaking this down by business unit or department. Are some locations using different hardware or software assets? If you’re receiving high incidents from your finance department for example, is there a common theme relating to their software? Does your sales-team use remote access applications? Does your satellite office get the same training and help at the onboarding stage as your main premises? These are some of the potential issues that a location or department breakdown can help you identify.

You can break other trends down by time. For example, time of day, day-of-week or a month-by-month trendline. This can help you in the future so that you have enough analysts available at peak times. You’ll also understand the effects of any new IT implementations on your service desk by noticing ticket or contact increases in a particular period.

One thing we often see when we run an audit before partnering with a client is that the data hasn’t been normalised. People often forget

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to account for some months being longer than others. For many businesses, there will be fewer tickets in months where you have bank holidays as there are fewer users at work. Make sure to apply normalisation to your data to get a truthful trend.

First time fix rateHow many of your tickets get resolved in one single motion by your first line analysts? In the next chapter, I focus on one of the most important metrics for an IT service desk - first time fix rate. This is one of our favourite metrics as it’s so closely aligned with customer satisfaction. When a user picks up the phone or sends a ticket to the service desk, they expect a quick resolution. Preferably an immediate one, especially when reporting incidents that interrupt their own work. How you define, track and analyse your FTF can have a big impact on performance and processes. It is also a great way to keep your team user-focused.

Watch out for rubber ticketsIf your first-line resolution rate looks great but doesn’t match the feedback you get from users, it could be that you have some rubber tickets bouncing around in your system. Keep an eye out for tickets passed to other teams only to rebound right back or sent around in circles. It might look like it’s been dealt with appropriately by your first line but actually, it’s taken days or weeks to get resolved. Of course, there will be occasions when an escalation is relevant, or that the ticket was sent to the service desk but was actually a matter for another department such as facilities. You need to be able to identify these vs the erroneous rubber tickets.

Aged ticketsHow many tickets are languishing in the system for weeks or months and why? Some systems create automated tickets that do not actually need an analyst’s attention but they can still create a build-up of ignored issues. If this is the case, you would need to exclude these from your analysis. If this is not the cause of your high aged ticket rate, then you may have cause for concern.

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Incidents vs requestsYour system should track ticket type into these two very distinct buckets. An incident identifies a technical issue whereas a request could be as simple as a user requesting access to a new app or a password reset. Of course, it’s best to have more requests than incidents. High incident numbers suggest deeper IT issues such as stability or user training so if this trend appears in your reports, you know it’s time to look for patterns and root causes where the same incidents repeat themselves.

Reporting should be regular, meaningful and highlight actionable insights. Keeping on top of these core metrics will help you identify training issues and how to better organise your processes. Even more powerful is that you can better defend your organisation by spotting issues before they become incidents.

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2.2 First time fix - do your metrics reveal the truth?It’s easy to understand why the FTF rate is the service desk metric that gets the most attention. When measured correctly, it’s the figure that identifies when your end users get a resolution at the time of asking for it. Therefore, it is closely related to user satisfaction.

Improving your FTF rate helps you stay focused on the user experience while identifying issues with your team’s processes and performance. For this to be a productive exercise, your FTF rate measurement must be reliable, accurate and consistent with user feedback. You need all stakeholders to understand and agree on what FTF actually means.

There’s no industry consensus on naming or defining FTF or even the name. For example, some refer to FTF as First Call Resolution or First Contact Resolution. That’s why some IT functions report a FTF from anything between 30% and 98% (according to the Service Desk Institute research).

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Know the difference between FTF, FLF and SDRTo avoid confusion, you first need to define FTF... and what it’s not. FTF is neither first line fix (FLF) or service desk resolution (SDR). While all 3 metrics require support tickets to be logged and resolved by the service desk, here’s how they differ:

SDR doesn’t require the ticket to have been handled only by 1st Line. The ticket may have done the rounds through multiple resolver groups before being resolved by 1st Line. It also doesn’t require any prompt resolution of the ticket.

FLF is a measure of tickets which have only been handled by 1st Line, but, like SDR, not necessarily with any prompt resolution.

For us, FTF requires the ticket handling to be self-contained within the 1st Line to have been resolved in one single motion without break or delay.

Your FTF definition needs to make sense in your organisation and team. It might be quite a technical definition, very specific, or easy to understand. For example at Acora we define FTF like this:

A ticket that is resolved in ‘one single motion without break or delay’ that typically will have to be:

• Logged and resolved without the need to save, close and later reopen the ticket.

• Resolved by the analyst from his/her desk position.

• Resolved without requiring assistance from another colleague.

• Resolved quickly. While the ‘single motion’ might involve the analyst calling the user back, it should happen within a set time limit. We use 15 minutes as our FTF deadline to allow an analyst to fix and return a call to the user. The analyst should not work on anything else during that time frame. They should be focussing on the one resolution at hand.

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Define ‘fixed’Once you’ve agreed your FTF definition, you need to consider the variables to include in your analyses. For example, what does ‘resolved’ actually mean? Is the user happy? Is the problem fixed? And what happens if it’s the user that has made the error?

It’s important to be very specific about this criteria. If your FTF rate doesn’t align with user feedback, then you must look again at how you define ‘fixed’.

Define ‘first time’If a user is calling, it’s easier to define ‘first time’ as the problem being fixed during the phone call. But what happens if the contact is made by logging a ticket or email? Perhaps the service desk can resolve the issue as soon as they have looked into it. But what if it takes 2 days to get around to it plus time spent reading it, researching a fix and yet more time to resolve and contact the user? In other words, the total time an analyst spent on the ticket might only amount to 15 minutes but the end user is still left dangling for two days. That’s not a recipe for customer satisfaction.

Timing and the criteria around timing need to be transparent. At Acora, we only count phone call tickets in our FTF rate so we know that the tracking makes sense to us and our clients. After all, the FTF rate is most important in relation to urgent incidents and queries and users are more likely to call than send a written ticket.

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Agree on the formulaFinally, the stakeholders and managers interpreting the results need to understand and agree on your FTF formula.

You might decide that it should be a percentage of ‘tickets’, ‘calls’ or ‘incidents’ resolved in the first contact over the total number of incidents resolved or opened. Or, the total number of incidents resolved less the total number of incidents reopened over the total number of incidents.

Whatever your formula for calculating FTF, it must make sense and remain consistent for your reporting to be meaningful.

Understand the environmentIt’s important your FTF definitions and rules align with your business goals. It’s also important to understand any factors that influence its results that are outside the control of your service desk. For instance, there’s no getting around those tickets that need a physical visit. By their nature, they can’t be fixed ‘first time’, neither can your service desk be held responsible if the ticket relates to a 3rd party fault. To make the FTF rate a fair and representative figure, you need a way to identify and exclude tickets that don’t fall under your remit.

If your FTF rate doesn’t match up with anecdotal end user satisfaction, then take a step back and look again at your definition. Work to make the metric better reflect reality. Use it to guide your team goals, but remember to look at the bigger picture when reviewing reports. After all, no amount of ‘but look at this percentage’ will work under a tidal wave of negative end user feedback.

Although all these steps can feel like a lot, most good service management tools can mark a resolved ticket as ‘FTF’ if logged and resolved without being saved first.

This will give you a reasonable basis for meaningful FTF reports. Reports that you can understand and that help you make informed management decisions.

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2.3 The phone is not deadAs IT professionals, it’s easy for us to get carried away with new technologies that promise time and cost-savings. But what happened to the human touch? Does the phone offer something that chat boxes and self-service portals can’t? I think so and here’s why.

With so many options for users to communicate with your helpdesk, it is easy to overlook one of the most effective tools in the service desk’s armoury. The telephone might not be the newest piece of technology, but as a support channel, it is still in style. In fact, it remains one of the best methods for improved customer satisfaction and resolution time. Here’s why I want to remind you all that the phone is not dead.

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Instant support: When a user needs a fast fix, most still prefer to pick up the telephone than to try typing out an explanation. Many users don’t have the language or knowledge to know how to describe the problem and need guidance. Rather than being confronted by a set of drop-down lists and radio buttons that they don’t understand, an analyst can ask questions in a variety of ways that are more digestible to the layperson. This approach is naturally going to make life easier for the user who’s often already frustrated and pressed for time.

Reliable contact method: The telephone is one of the most stable pieces of communication infrastructure a business has. When a user has a hardware issue with their laptop or can’t log in via their VPN, the phone is probably their only option.

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The human touch: In a world where users are increasingly met by chatbots and self-service portals, nothing beats the human touch. For requests, a self-service portal might be all the user wants or needs. But when users have an issue that hinders their work, their frustration levels are better handled by a human voice.

Giving full attention: When a user contacts the service desk via a chatbox, they are all too often aware that the analyst is working on simultaneous tickets. Having an analyst give 100% of their attention speeds up the interaction and fix-time per ticket.


Avoiding phone support pitfallsDespite our love for telephone support here at Acora, using the phone alone is not enough to guarantee user satisfaction. It’s not just the tools you use, but how you use them that counts. Here are a few of the pitfalls to avoid to ensure your IT service desk maintains phone support excellence.

Immediacy: The reason why a user chose the telephone is that they expect a faster response time. If the phone is still ringing after 15 or 20 seconds, you won’t be winning any brownie points. Ensure you have the resources to pick up the phone within a reasonable time.

Communication: Analysts needs to keep the communication flowing. Even if only to say they will be quiet for a few minutes while they concentrate on the fix. If the analyst needs to access the user’s device remotely, make sure to:

• Ask for permission first

• Advise whether the user can continue to work

• If they would need to wait

• Suggest a waiting time If the user needn’t be there and it will take longer than 5-7 minutes, they may opt to leave their desk rather than hang around. Give the user the option to do so and keep them informed.

Telephone manner: We screen all our analysts via telephone as a part of our hiring process. Make sure your analysts have the right customer service skills and a clear telephone voice before you let them loose on your customers. If they don’t, make time for training and be ready to organise your team so that the right people take the calls.

It’s easy as IT professionals to get over-excited about machine-based communication channels, self-service tools and automated chatbots. In our eagerness for technical solutions, we must remember to stay customer-focused and listen to what the customer wants and needs. Before you rush out to replace phone support with other channels, check your service desk stats, survey your users and listen to their feedback.

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2.4 Creating an IT support SLA that actually worksAre you redefining a Support desk SLA? Are you entering into a new partnership? Getting this right is crucial to success. I’ll walk you through the steps to building an SLA that works for you and your end users.

Do you have a Service Level Agreement in place but struggle to see the value? Perhaps you or your organisation have concerns about having an SLA? Whether you’re outsourced or in-house, having an agreement in place is the foundation for a successful partnership. Here’s why it’s important and how to make it a useful tool.

An SLA should at least:• Set realistic but ambitious expectations.

• Outline categories of service.

• Include performance evaluation criteria and metrics.

• Set out the responsibilities of both parties.

• Set out support availability and response times.

• Include maintenance downtime allowances.

• Be actually agreed upon by both parties.

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Review your current SLAAre you doing enough to deliver outstanding customer satisfaction? There’s no point in having an SLA that is too easy, but likewise, it must be achievable. How far away are you from hitting your KPIs? Which areas need improvement and which areas are you already over-delivering on? These are questions to ask yourself and your customers.

Define your descriptions of serviceOutline the purpose of the support desk service. Describe the scope and the specific business processes that your team supports. Clearly outline what is at stake for each department.

Quantify the potential business losses for downtime, these can be reputational as well as financial. They might also vary according to department and specific times. For example, Payroll is business critical at month-end, but it might not require such tight fix rates at other times. I’ve had clients with debt management systems that cost millions per hour during downtime. This was clearly a high priority for the business and, therefore, the SLA!

Define the SLA termsDefine the duration of the SLA, the roles and responsibilities of both parties and include exceptions where needed. Does the business need the same availability on holidays and weekends? Do you need to provide round the clock cover or cover in other time zones than the one in which you’re sat right now?

Response times can be one of the sticking points for many IT support desk SLAs. Some customers might worry about signing an agreement that promises to fix X within 8 hours. ‘Does this mean it will always take 8 hours to get the fix?’ Consider including a minimum and maximum time limit to allay these fears.

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Set out your measurable KPIsIdentify the most meaningful metrics to help you monitor performance against your SLA. Ensure those goals are ambitious but achievable. While desk metrics alone are not fully conclusive, they can help keep you on track. I’ve written a chapter on metrics in case you need some pointers.

Review, refine and reviseAlthough you have defined a set duration for the SLA, the contents can be improved over time. Be ready to adjust SLAs periodically. This might be monthly or quarterly depending on the business.

Whether you have no SLA at all or because you realise it needs reworking, I hope these tips help you set out in the right direction. Next up, how to improve customer satisfaction...

Describe the scope and the specific business processes that your team supports. Clearly outline what is at stake for each department.

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2.5 Improving customer satisfactionWhen managing an IT Support function, excellent customer satisfaction is your holy grail. But do you know how to track, measure and improve it on an ongoing basis?

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Three simple steps to IT support satisfactionTracking and improving IT Support desk customer satisfaction is an ongoing process. While the SLAs and KPIs might have been set by senior managers, the buck stops with the service desk.

Survey your usersPost-ticket surveys give you the opportunity to assess users’ experiences. When each ticket is closed, collect information to give you data per analyst, per issue type and more. By tying questionnaires to individual tickets, you’ll collect feedback in real-time and can look for trends. As long as your user group is large enough, these responses can provide meaningful insight.

In your questionnaire, include at least one open question. This helps you pick up user grievances that you might not have considered. It also gives the user a voice.

Try to keep your questionnaire short enough for users to complete while ensuring you get enough relevant info.

These are some of the most useful questions to ask the user.

• Was the agent polite and courteous during all stages of the investigation?

• Do you feel the agent understood your issue?

• If the helpdesk was not able to resolve your issue during initial contact, did they advise the next steps?

• Were you satisfied with the time it took to resolve your issue?

• Were you kept up to date with the progress of your issue until closure?

• Were you satisfied with the overall service provided?

• Please provide any further detail of your experience when using the helpdesk to log this issue.

Besides these regular surveys, consider adding an annual (or bi-annual) survey that includes questions on systems and infrastructure.

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In your questionnaire, include at least one open question. This helps you pick up user grievances that you might not have considered. It also gives the user a voice.

Track your KPIsQuestionnaires alone won’t give you the full picture. Set out SMART (specific, measurable, achievable and timely) KPIs that align with your SLA.

Your Support desk metrics are an excellent resource for:

• Tracking ticket volumes.

• Identifying trends.

• Checking first-time fix rates.

• Identifying problems.

• Foreseeing potential incidents. This quantitative data can enhance the experience of your users by giving you the tools to identify areas for improvement. If you’re unsure about what you should be tracking, take a look at the section on metrics your IT service desk should be measuring.

Communicate & adaptSet up a regular review for key stakeholders to attend. Aim for a monthly meeting to discuss the following:

• Reporting and analysis of survey and ticket data.

• Verbal feedback from customers and management teams.

• How you plan to improve customer satisfaction levels.

• If you are hitting goals, consider tightening them to continually improve.

• Discuss changes that pose risks (people, processes and technology).

If you’re hitting your goals with ease, consider making your KPIs more ambitious. To demonstrate a commitment to revised KPIs, ensure your Service Level Agreement is kept aligned and up to date.

Now you have a solid process in place for customer satisfaction, just make sure you deliver on those promises and be ready to adjust.

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2.6 How to better support a smaller IT user baseEveryone talks about the challenges of handling a large number of users. But what about the IT support desk that handles a small user base?

Typically, a smaller user base means you work in a smaller business and that has challenges of its own. You likely have smaller budgets, fewer resources and not a huge IT staff. While there can be advantages to being small and nimble, there are some common issues that face smaller teams.

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Challenges

Limited availabilityYou might have a smaller user base, but they have the same expectations as a larger one. The world has been mobile for some time and organisations of all sizes expect remote access, out of hours support and fast fix times.

If you have a small support team, you may struggle to cover business hours, let alone evenings, weekends and holidays. If you have only a handful of people, it might only take one person to be on holiday and another to be sick for your team to be overwhelmed ―and your users to be underwhelmed by your service.

Management constraintsAre you an IT Manager, Support desk Manager and part-time analyst? In a small business, it can be virtually impossible to have a pure management role. Rolling up your sleeves and getting stuck in with day-to-day support is critical to keeping users up and running. But it can mean that managing your team takes a back seat.

Project delaysJust as your management capabilities are being squeezed, so is project management. If you’re fighting a tide of support tickets, long-term projects are likely to get sidelined, delayed or temporarily postponed.

Finding a balance between project rollout and IT support is critical. Today’s projects, if left unfinished, can become next month’s problems and incidents.

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SolutionsHow can your small IT support team better handle these challenges? Take a step back to assess your current capabilities and where you can leverage technology and external support.

Manage expectationsThe first step is to recognise what is achievable, the strengths and weaknesses of your team and where your challenges lie. You have to make time to recognise what is possible and what is not. If you get pushback from users and senior management over your fix rates and KPIs, you have to be in a position to explain the support team’s limitations. This is also the first step in building a business case for investment in technology, people or partnerships to help you scale.

Leverage Software as a Service (SaaS) tech & vendors Cloud-based SaaS tools like Office 365 have a variety of licensing levels. Selecting the best fit for your business can be tricky. But you can leverage vendors to help you decide which features you need, how to make the most of it and to help with training and support.

Shop around for a vendor that offers the best support package, but that also recognises what will work best for your business. With SaaS technology evolving so quickly, having shared ownership with a good vendor can be an advantage. The vendor should stay up to date with all updates, new apps and other changes to the software and guide you so that you can focus on other IT priorities.

PartnershipsIf you’re still struggling to maintain effective IT support, consider outsourcing some of your duties. Having recognised the gaps in your team and technology, you’ll already know which duties they should be. For most small businesses, IT Support is the first thing to be outsourced. This frees up internal resources to manage projects and teams, which is more cost-effective than hiring, training and managing more support staff directly.

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If you get pushback from users and senior management over your fix rates and KPIs, you have to be in a position to explain the support team’s limitations.


Best practice and process tips

Section 3

In this section:

3.1 Password reset processes - page 45

3.2 How to implement successful joiners and leavers processes - page 48

3.3 Why your problem management process is failing and how to avoid major incidents - page 50

3.4 How prepared are you for a major incident? page 53

3.5 How to improve your software asset management process - page 57


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3.1 Password reset processesThe password reset request is probably one of the most common tickets your service desk receives. Yet end users don’t give a second thought to the costs involved.

It’s not just your end users that might not be giving your password reset process much thought. Do you know what it is costing your business? Does your Finance Director know?

What does your password reset process cost?Designing a password reset process that’s secure enough for your organisation but not too overly complex is tricky. A password reset request is seen as an insignificant task to most users. In reality, password resets cost organisations time, energy and money while also presenting potential security risks. The most common reason for a password reset is a forgotten password. Each reset takes up service desk support resources while the user is left unproductive.

Poor password management creates financial lossesAccording to a US-based survey, a cost of $420 per employee, per year is lost to password management. In the same survey, almost 40% of the users reported having more than 50 password resets in a single year. That’s a lot of lost time, money, productivity and end user satisfaction.

Password policies and data breach risksThere is a risk of security breaches as a recognition of poor password reset processes and management. Failing to verify a password reset can lead to fatal cyberattacks. Data security has become big headline news far too often. Such breaches present a PR tsunami risk. They carry significant penalties for organisations who’ve failed to protect data of EU citizens under the GDPR regulation.

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How to minimise password reset requestsWhat might seem like a simple request for the end user but is a potential security and a financial black-hole for those in the know. So what can you do to improve your password reset process?

Keep it simpleWhat’s more difficult than remembering a 16 character length password with a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and special characters? Remembering 20 of them!

Workplace users have to remember all their personal logins as well as their professional account passwords. If you help users minimise the number of passwords they need to remember, you’ll reduce password reset requests. Simply linking application passwords to Active Directory should result in a significant drop in password resets.

Who are you?Your service desk needs a verification protocol for phone reset request tickets. Having good reset tools is a good start, but many users prefer to pick up the phone and get it resolved immediately.

This consists of pre-set questions set up when a user joins. Service desk staff should be able to ask a series of questions without learning the full answer to the security question itself. For example, a user might have chosen to answer the question ‘What was your grandfather’s occupation?’. The Service Desk Analyst can ask for the 1st and 4th character in the answer, key it in and get the verification they need to conduct a reset.

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Having good reset tools is a good start, but many users prefer to pick up the phone and get it resolved immediately.


Self-service password reset toolsSelf-service tools can be time and money savers... but only if they get used. Self-service adoption is often overestimated in many areas of IT support.

Uptake can be underwhelming. Unless you use auto-enrolment (for example by a popup wizard that asks for security question data before a user can access the network), then you’ll have very low numbers using your self-service option. Even with the enrolment in place, you’ll find that many users still prefer to simply pick up the phone and have a human reset their password for them.

I hope these tips have helped you and your business going forward and what best suits your organisation. All businesses can benefit from password reset process reviews on a regular basis to ensure that time, resources and money are maximised and risks minimised.

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3.2 How to implement successful joiners and leavers processesJoiners and leavers processes are critical to information security and asset management. Get it right and you’ll build a valuable relationship between your service desk and users. All too often, the responsibility for maintaining a smooth process is unclear. This leaves everyone frustrated, wastes money and exposes your business to unnecessary security risk.

Why joiners and leavers need processesWhen a new starter joins your organisation, their first impression of your IT support team will be based on the success of your joiners process. Getting a new user onboarded swiftly with the right tools results in a good relationship from the outset. To get it right, define formal processes in advance from the top down. Agree on set profiles for each user type and be ready to implement so that users aren’t left hanging around. You need to consider everyone who uses and has access to your equipment and assets. This includes contractors and 3rd parties too.

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When a new starter joins your organisation, their first impression of your IT support team will be based on the success of your joiners process.


How to create and manage a solid leavers and joiners process

CollaborationThe first step is to identify your stakeholders. Ensure line managers, facilities management and end users all know their part in taking responsibility for assets, requests and updates.

Automation (active directory)One of the biggest pitfalls in any process is human error. Automation based on defined parameters that can prevent many problems. Creating user accounts using Active Directory, for example, takes much of the time and potential for mistakes out of the equation.

Database managementCreate and maintain a database with asset register locations and usernames so you know where hardware is. And which software assets and accounts are needed. Failure to find an asset might mean it’s lost, stolen, or just languishing in a Line Manager’s drawer somewhere.

Monthly auditsThe data you keep about leavers relies on human input. A monthly audit can plug any gaps in your asset database. In addition to checking the data created by your directory, consider implementing a simple questionnaire to go to end users. This helps to confirm what they have access to, what they still need, and if anything has been lost or stolen.

Make end user reporting easyDon’t have people jump through hoops to report missing hardware. Make it easy for users to report lost and stolen assets with a low-friction process. Remember that users can feel worried about the repercussions of losing assets holding confidential information. It’s not the Desk’s responsibility to shame anyone. Encourage users to report issues fast. The quicker they report, the quicker the business can respond to minimise risk.

Saving everyone time, saving costs, managing risks and giving end users a good service impacts all business units ―not just the service desk. What’s more, having stringent security management will help you achieve ISO20071 Accreditation... and set the tone with new joiners on the importance of security matters in your organisation.

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3.3 Why your problem management process is failing and how to avoid major incidentsMany organisations view problem management as a secondary function. In the majority of firms, I’ve seen responsibility for Incident Management assigned to a dedicated Incident Manager. But the responsibility for problem management is often overlooked or watered down.

Without an effective problem management process in place, IT Teams firefight issues too late and have a high number of incidents as a result.

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Think of a problem as an illness and an incident as symptoms of a problem.

What is problem management?There is a great deal of confusion over what constitutes a ‘problem’. Confusing problems with incidents is a common cause of inefficiency and business critical IT failures. At Acora, we follow best practice service management principles to define the terms and processes around problem and incident management.

To help you discern the difference, think of a problem as an illness and an incident as symptoms of a problem. A major incident differs further in that it impacts a lot of people at the same time – a system failure for example. Seeing a repeating set of similar incidents may be an indication that something is deteriorating. Unchecked, it might cause a critical failure and cause a major incident.

Three pillars of problem management successSuccessful problem management is upheld by 3 essential pillars - people, process and technology. To ensure readiness for problem resolution, you need a framework. Define roles and responsibilities and asset management procedures in advance:

People: Identify, train and use your Infrastructure & Application leaders. These individuals will be key to identifying and removing Known Errors from your environment. It’s essential they understand the fundamentals and objectives of problem management

Process: Use a tried and tested best practice aligned problem management process. ITIL remains widely regarded as the de facto standard for service management. Ensure ownership and responsibility for problems (and their resolutions) are well defined. This is often achieved through a RACI Matrix.

Technology: Ensure it’s sufficient to accurately identify, manage and report problems. Include links into change / release management and knowledge management.

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3 Common failures in problem managementUnderestimating the cost of poor problem managementNot understanding the cost of poor problem management is a major factor. By analysing the frequency of problems and looking at incident root causes, you’ll identify areas for improvement in your problem management process. You’ll also put financial numbers to the problems that have caused user downtime or major incidents. This, in turn, justifies the time and resources required and demonstrates a clear ROI.

Poor categorisation of incidentsAnalysts must follow strict categorisation of incidents in your service desk system. Incidents are mislabeled all too often. This causes issues when proactively looking for trends that lead up to major incidents and makes retrospective root-cause analysis difficult.

Where incidents go to dieAll too often, incidents find themselves ignored in an ‘Incident hospice’. A lack of discipline among analysts can lead to incidents being excused - assumed to belong to a bigger Problem - which itself never gets fixed. Aside from instilling the discipline to act on recurring problems, it is important to give analysts the right tools. Analysts need tools to label tickets so that they do get flagged and recurring issues have a chance to be cured. Once again ownership is key.

Implementing and sticking to a solid problem management process will save your organisations time and money in the long run. In the next chapter, I’ll talk about Incident Management. I hope that the tips above provide you with thoughts on how you could reduce the number and/or frequency of major incidents in the first place but being prepared for incidents is just as crucial, no matter how robust your problem management process.

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All too often, incidents find themselves ignored in an incident Hospice.

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3.4 How prepared are you for a major incident?In the last chapter, I talked about problem management and how it’s often confused with major incident management.

While the two are linked, they are very different beasts. However strong your problem management is, you must be ready for business critical incidents.

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Do you know a major incident when you see one?Often the signs are quite obvious. The desk gets flooded with similar tickets from many users.

Critical business functions are being affected and steam is pouring from the ears of your management team. While these are obvious indicators, it isn’t very helpful to use panic levels as your definition.

ITIL requires that the IT team and the business agree on what constitutes a major incident. This is based on severity, urgency and impact. ISO 20000 requires the following steps for major incident management:

• Agreement on what constitutes a major incident.

• A distinct and separate procedure for ‘major’ vs other incidents.

• An outline of responsibilities and responsible parties.

• A defined review process. Let’s take a closer look at each of these requirements to help you create your major incident plan before you need it.

Agreeing on major incident definitionsWhat constitutes a major incident for one business might not for another. The same goes for business units within one business. At Acora, we have SLAs set up to manage Incident classification that is specific to each client. If you run an in-house team, SLAs are just as important. Each department will likely need its own set of resolution times, resources and communication lines according to its needs and business function.

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Major incident roles & responsibilitiesRunning around like a headless chicken during a major incident is not a good look. Roles and processes should be strictly defined before a major incident strikes. When kicking off your MI process, nothing beats a war-room style meeting. Get all relevant parties together and remind them of their roles.

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Major incident managerHe or she will be responsible for overseeing the major incident process. They’ll ensure that you have engaged the appropriate resources and that users and managers are kept up to date. Depending on the size of the IT team, it could be a Service Desk Analyst or a more senior technical manager with knowledge specific to the incident type.

Problem managerThis should be a different person to the Major Incident Manager. A Problem Manager will be most useful after the resolution to help with root cause analysis. The Incident Manager will be pushing for an immediate fix so that normal business can resume ASAP.

Service deskIt goes without saying perhaps, but you must decide how much of your service desk to devote to the major incident. In serious cases, you might decide that it should be all hands on deck for the major incident and everything unrelated should go on hold.

Change managerIf major changes had to be implemented in order to restore service, your Change Manager will need to be involved.

SLA managerSomeone needs to be recording downtime and SLA misses so that this can be reported internally and to the customer or management teams.


CommunicationThere is one vital role missing from the list... the customer!

Whether your customer is within your own business or a paying client, they need to be kept in the loop as much as possible. Your Incident Manager should be providing a quick and concise summary at least every hour - more frequently if possible.

Here are the main points to provide to the customer, it needn’t be war and peace but should include the following:

• Short description of the cause of the downtime.

• Impact of the downtime.

• Estimated time of resolution.

• Creating a template in advance will help the MI manager keep to the point and ensure timely delivery of updates.

• Root Cause Analysis. After a major incident resolution, you’ll need to produce a report on how it happened, why it happened and how to prevent it from happening again. This is where your Problem Manager steps in. By working through the tickets you can perform an RCA. Check this against the solution used to get up and running again, ensuring you’ve dealt with any loose ends. A patched-together temporary solution may not be sufficient in the long run.

If you’re experiencing repeated major incidents, go back to your problem management processes and look for root causes regularly.

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3.5 How to improve your software asset management processCould you improve your software ROI? Or perhaps you’d like to reduce the time you spend on Software Asset Management (SAM) without harming efficiency?

In this chapter, we’ll look at the fundamentals that drive SAM best practice and how you can reduce the unnecessary time and budget expenditure.

The goal of Software Asset Management (SAM) is to drive cost-efficiency without negatively impacting business operations. Good Software Asset Management (SAM) enables a business to gain maximum benefit from IT investment. Just as with hardware asset management, SAM requires the integration of people, processes and technology so that software licenses can be monitored, evaluated and managed accordingly.

Unfortunately, SAM is not always managed well, especially where individual user licenses are required.

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Who is responsible for SAM?Who is responsible for purchasing, deploying, tracking and optimising your SAM process? While this might vary according to the size of your business and organisational structure, for most it will look like this:

PurchasingIT Support and IT Procurement need to have an agreed process for purchasing. Establish a set of guidelines that enable swift purchase and deployment:

• Identify the people responsible for software acquisition and price negotiations.

• Create a pre-approved list of vendors.

• Decide whether employees can purchase any software directly and if so, provide clear processes for tracking.

Tracking & reportingUltimately, tracking and reporting fall under the IT Management category. In order to assess your current SAM process, you’ll need to understand:

• How much spend and labour is currently assigned to the SAM process?

• What is your annual spend on software licenses and maintenance fees?

• How frequently do you conduct software audits?

• How do you track software usage and how confident are you in the data?

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Setting targetsAgain, this can vary according to the size of your organisation. You’ll need to decide how many people, which people and what budget you can dedicate to Software Asset Management - for some organisations, outsourcing might be a favourable option. Once you have your team in place, set measurable, achievable KPIs and give each one a deadline. Those KPIs might include:

• Reduce license expenditure.

• Reduce time spent on internal audits.

• Increase software usage policy compliance.

• Tips and tricks for improving ongoing SAM.

Software Asset Management is an ongoing process and you can’t rely on users to update you when they no longer use a particular piece of software. Use tools and technology to reduce some of the overheads associated with auditing. For example, you can run a script to check what has been used in the last 90 days to flag dormant accounts. Stay on top of perpetual licenses as well as annual licenses. Some perpetual licenses carry annual maintenance fees that can be overlooked in your budgets. Above all else, have the tools in place to catalogue software assets. Managing a library that is associated with your CMDB and align it with your joiners, movers and leavers process.

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Why your support desk needs to be preparedIT Support wants to keep an audit trail for monitoring, reporting and training purposes. It’s very easy for personal data to find its way into tickets that you needn’t keep for long at all. For example:

• A remote worker asks for a hardware device to be sent to their home address.

• A work phone fails -the user supplies their personal number so you can reach them.

• An HR system has an issue, a user sends you a screenshot including employee data.

In each of these cases, you don’t need that personal data kept for your audit trail. Yet this can easily end up sat in your ticketing system unnoticed - unless you’ve planned in advance how to manage it.

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Mitigating the risksTraining, training and more training: It goes without saying that training your IT Support Team is imperative... but so is training the users themselves. The easiest way to mitigate risk is to avoid collecting unnecessary personal data in the first place. If both analyst and user are conscious of the fact, then compliance becomes less burdensome on your team. Your organisation should also have a plan in place on how to provide a data subject with their records should they ask for it.

Carefully manage system access rights: Conduct an assessment to decide who really needs access to which systems. This applies company-wide, not just to your team. Your Data Officer and IT Security resource should be working with you to determine access rights. Fewer people having access to personal data will inevitably lower GDPR breach risks.

Ditch the dead data: Do not hold records longer than necessary. In most cases, a ticket should not be needed after 30-45 days in order to carry out your audits and reporting. Run your support desk metric reports regularly enough that you don’t have to hold on to tickets for any longer than necessary.

Automate GDPR audits: Take as much of the legwork out of your auditing process as possible by running scripts that will help you flag potential personal data items. However, be careful with non-text items such as voice calls and images (screenshots). These will need a more manual approach, so do plan how to limit collecting this kind of data and lighten the auditing load.

Some environments will be more prone to picking up personal data than others. Therefore, it is crucial that all IT Support desk analysts and their customers understand their duties, rights - and the processes that are in place to engage with GDPR standards. I hope that these tips will help you put the finishing touches on your compliance practices.

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Preparing your service desk for the future of IT

Section 4

In this section:

4.1 How to meet the support challenges of emerging technologies - page 63

4.2 Windows 10 - how to support users during ongoing updates? - page 66

4.3 Five ways IT support will change in 2020 - page 68


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4.1 How to meet the support challenges of emerging technologiesWith greater demand for mobility and cloud-based apps, new technology continues to create complexity in the workplace.

We really are at a time of great innovation and change. This is both exciting and challenging for those of us in the IT space. In this time of transformation, how can your service desk better support emerging technology?

Balancing change and governanceFinding the line between not being completely obstructive and losing all governance is a balancing act. It is in the nature of internal IT departments to conduct thorough due diligence before any IT transformation takes place. Unfortunately, this means they can sometimes get a reputation for being slow or even unhelpful and resistant to change. If you have execs or managers that are pleading for a technology you can’t yet support, it can result in users going off and doing their own thing - potentially causing big issues for your firm.

One of the biggest areas for concern right now is how data is handled in the cloud. Users, or even whole user groups, may already be uploading data to different places on cloud apps. This is problematic enough when it comes to data security. But when you add GDPR and other compliance requirements into the mix, it can cause major headaches.

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Encourage curiosity beyond the ticketsIn an ideal world, the new technology would go through the rigours of research, discovery and planning before being unleashed on your users. However, it pays to prepare for a curveball. If a senior exec announced they want to roll out new tablets or smartphones as soon as possible, will your team be ready to support the users?

The pressure for emerging tech usually comes from tech-savvy users. But they may not have enough of an understanding of the impact and potential pitfalls of their request. To support a change in this scenario, you have to spend time understanding the challenge. What these users are trying to achieve? Look at what similar organisations are doing to achieve the same results and learn from them.

Ultimately, the service desk has to proactively prepare for such changes. Service Desk Analysts are often at an early stage in their careers. Encourage them to learn about new technology in their own time. Is your business a PC dominated environment? Encourage service desk colleagues to have a look at Apple devices and think about how they would support those vs Android devices. Guide them and fuel their curiosity with questions about how they would manage new technologies and what kind of issues might arise. Fostering this kind of problem-solving attitude in an analyst can help you find the consultants, engineers and leaders of the future.

Turn Tech-Savvy Users into Super Users

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While some users will be handed a tablet only for it to fester in a drawer, there are those that devour every piece of new tech they get their hands on. It is usually these people that have been pushing the IT department for the change. One way to work smarter with these users is to onboard them as an extension of your IT service desk. Use their enthusiasm and technical knowledge to help other users get trained on using new apps.

Engage your Super Users as the go-to resource for queries that are more training related than they are a request or incident. It is impractical for your analysts to become expert users on every application. Having Super Users train others in their group benefits the whole organisation. IT Support can put people in touch with users that know how to use advanced features; it could be for a program or an application, for example. That extra support for the wider organisation is sure to increase productivity and reduce tickets that are more of a training issue than a request or incident.

Make sure that Super Users get recognised for their efforts. Bring them close and make them into IT advocates. Most importantly, make sure they understand the pitfalls of introducing new technology before you put in the groundwork.

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Engage your Super Users as the go-to resource for queries that are more training related than they are a request or incident.


4.2 Windows 10 - how to support users during ongoing updates?Is your business deploying Windows 10? Are you ready to support it on an ongoing basis? While the initial deployment will be handled much the same as any other OS upgrade, Windows 10 isn’t a set and forget implementation.

Your business will rely heavily on an engineering function to handle the planning, customisation and standardisation of the upgrade. But your IT team needs to find a new way to manage the updates that Windows 10 will bring every 6 months or so.

Why Windows 10 requires new thinkingIn 2016, it was announced that Windows 10 will be the last ever operating system. This means that there will be no more large-scale releases but smaller incremental updates instead. We have become used to this style of OS update on our mobile devices but it does present a new set of challenges for desktop support.

Instead of having months to plan, configure new hardware and test app compatibility, updates will be pushed out automatically. Your support team will need to respond fast. For most businesses, a new OS would usually happen every 5 or 6 years. Now, you might expect a new version every 6 months. If you don’t keep up, you will have issues.

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How to structure Windows 10 resourcesWith each release, you can expect old features to disappear and new ones to be deployed. The challenge for the IT team as a whole to think differently. The traditional method of OS rollout might have meant drafting in specialist resources. Specific people for the duration of the planning and implementation. For many businesses, this might be in the form of an external or contractor team. After implementation, that resource might disband or leave completely.

Where Windows 10 differs is that you need to retain a product expert with an engineering & planning focus. Someone that understands what the impact of each update will be. Similar to the Agile DevOps methodology, you’ll need a highly skilled and nimble approach not only to deployment, but also to support.

A lot of users are coming straight from Windows 7. They will experience a new look & feel & new features designed to make using their devices easier.

These changes can create confusion among new users so expect more calls into the desk. Not just after initial implementation, but with each new update from Windows. There has to be a concerted effort from you and your team to continually upskill in order to keep up with the pain points of your users.

With Windows 10, it will no longer be a one-off project each time the OS is updated. You need to allocate specialist resources on a permanent basis, whether you delegate this to existing team members or bring in a new dedicated resource. With this change in structure, you’ll be able to better support your users through the changes ahead.

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With each release, you can expect old features to disappear and new ones to be deployed. The challenge for the IT team as a whole is to think differently.


4.3 five ways IT support will change in 2020As we near the end of this book, it’s a good time to take stock of the current state of play in IT support services.

In this chapter, we look at how IT support services are evolving and which of the current trends are set to continue. In a world increasingly concerned with security, data compliance, tech adoption and quality of service, here’s what to look out for next.

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The after effects of GDPRWhile organisations are handling post-GDPR processes, we can already imagine the far-reaching implications it will continue to have on the IT support teams. Because ITSM tools hold lots of personal data, I’m sure every IT team will have undergone specific education and training. The policy on the storage and collection of personal data used in the ITSM system now has to be transparent and users need to give clear consent to it being stored. Users can also request their data to be removed, even from historical records. This is just the tip of the iceberg, however, as the responsibility for company-wide data security and timely reporting of personal data breaches have to be defined and accurately maintained.

Meanwhile, IT suppliers are likely to be jointly liable for any data breaches. There are already some implications across service and system providers as well as the suppliers of cloud-computing and storage. By 2020, I’d expect the GDPR dust to have fully settled. And for organisations to have more competent data compliance protocols and processes. However, with the penalties for GDPR violations being so fiercely high, how businesses have responded to GDPR so far will surely affect their futures.

Reliable cloud storageManaging escalating storage demands with limited resources is a huge challenge for many businesses today. To alleviate the burden, many organisations have already turned to the cloud. It is an especially attractive option for data storage where latency and security are of lower priority. However, as previously noted, 2020 will see enterprises that deal with personal data from any EU citizens seeking robust security assurances from cloud storage providers.

Despite there already having been a mass migration to the cloud, it has often been more reactive than proactive. Usually as a consequence of an immediate need such as SaaS deployments or Shadow IT. The cost efficiency associated with off-premises storage will continue to drive demand well into the future. But I expect Cloud Storage initiatives to be undertaken with more purpose, forethought and proactive planning.

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Increased service requests vs incidentsWe are already seeing a shift in service requests vs incidents. Where once ITIL made no distinction, since ITIL v3 was launched, there is now a very clear-cut framework to distinguish between the two.

Incidents:An incident is ‘an unplanned interruption to an IT service or reduction in the quality of an IT service.’ An incident indicates that usual service that a user receives is being hindered so this is usually going to cause an urgent ticket and need a quick resolution.

Service or change requests:A service or change request is ‘a formal request from a user for something to be provided – for example, a request for information or advice’. A service request is, therefore, less urgent and less likely to be business critical. Service requests are not limited to information and advice. Such a request could also be for a standard change such as a password reset or more memory. These services can follow a pre-approval change process and are low risk.

So why would service requests increase in the coming years? Increased demand for mobile services, new technologies and round the clock support will inevitably generate more service requests than ever before. User expectations are in line with their experiences in home technology and service types that they experience outside the workplace. This leads us nicely onto the next trend to watch out for.

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Increased demand for mobile services, new technologies and round the clock support will inevitably generate more service requests than ever before.

Increased adoption of self-service and chat portalsIT users are becoming more used to using self-service guides and chat portals, thus opening the door to the adoption of similar services in the workplace. With the rise of E-commerce sites like Amazon, it is becoming more and more common to look for customer service support in a text form rather than on a voice call. While an Incident will be better served by a phone call directly to an expert, many simple service requests can be migrated to chat or self-service solutions.

According to the Service Desk Institute, self-service adoption has been increasing over the past few years and the trend looks set to continue. However, increasing self-service adoption in your own organisation is not without its challenges. It is not enough to set up a solid knowledge base, it must also be designed to give a high-quality and effective user experience if it is ever to attract and retain users.

Onshore vs offshore supportOffshore IT support was once upon a time praised by many as the most cost-effective solution. However, under the scrutiny of cost-benefit analysis, many businesses found that onshore support had more strengths and efficiencies that had been overlooked in the rush to cut expenditure. The quality of onshore communication and the ability to facilitate onsite resolutions has been steadily winning many businesses away from their offshore service providers for years. Onshore IT support desks can be expected to outperform their overseas counterparts in company knowledge, cultural fit and even compliance.

With compliance being such a hot topic in the coming years, it seems highly likely that onshore will continue to win out. It also seems like a natural progression that as chat portals and self-service solutions take hold, a superior quality of analysts can be afforded for Incident resolution.

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About AcoraAcora is a specialist provider of managed services to the mid-market. More than 200 clients trust us to take responsibility for part, or all, of their business IT.

Our flexible, high value managed services cater for your end user or infrastructure management requirements. They enable you to run an efficient and innovative IT operation that scales and flexes quickly, without investing in the capital or headcount that such an operation would normally require.

We will deliver within budget, security and compliance parameters, so you can focus on your business goals.

If you would like to find out more about how partnering with Acora can help transform your business, you can contact us via phone, email or through our website. Our team will be happy to help.

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