Serio IT Service Desk & Helpdesk Blog

A colleague here asks me to write about reporting for a customer who is trying to create an IT service management report for the first time, and has little or no Serio experience – and who is not sure what data to use or where to begin.

First of all, I’ll list the resources we have here on this website. Probably your first job should be to print and read our Service Desk Metrics White Paper. This white paper discusses different types of data, discusses why we write reports in the first place, and provides a sample reports template you can use.

This subject has come up before on this very blog, in these posts about metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). These posts might be of use:

Key Performance Indicators for Incident Management

Some Service Level Management Key Performance Indicators

Problem Management KPI Suggestions

Does Your Helpdesk/Service Desk Phone Just Ring Out?

There are others – search the blog for metrics and reporting.

(In case you’ve ever wondered, the difference between a metric and KPI is this: a metric is just a measure of something, whilst a KPI should be a measure of quality)

It doesn’t matter too much if the Categories you’ve got set-up and are using for Incident logging are a bit of a mess. Clearly this is not ideal and needs to be rectified at some point, but it should not stop you producing a report.

So having said all that, where do you start? You will need to locate and install a copy of SerioReports, as that is where (not surprisingly) most of the ready to run reports are located. Make sure you can connect to your live system with this – you’ll find instructions for how to do this in the SerioReports help.

Let’s look at some measures of quality we can use.

First Time Fix Rate (FTFR). You’ll find this in report AGT14, located under Agent Performance in your Report Explorer. FTFR is one (from many) measures of quality – it tells you how often, when a Customer calls with a problem, that they get an immediate resolution. If your figure is very low (for instance, less than 10%) it might indicate training or skills gaps within your Helpdesk or Service Desk team, issues with morale or motivation, or simply that the problems you deal with are of such a complex nature that FTFR will always be low.

This is where your judgement and skills as a manager will come into play – understanding why things are the way they are, and making recommendations for improvement.

Whilst you are in that area of SerioReports, have a look at who is resolving tickets by examining report AGT21 or AGT5.

I’ll continue this post either tomorrow or early next week.

Technorati Tags: ITSM

• Start-ups, Acquisitions, and your ITSM System
• Acquisitions and Start-ups from an ITSM perspective
• Reporting – are you a Superhero or Grapecrusher?

It’s not often I’m thrilled with the idea of new technology and gadgets. As someone in their mid-forties I’m old enough to remember the Pen PC from the late 90’s (sank without trace), Prestel (ditto), LED-display watches (useless and uncool) and a whole bunch of other stuff that was going to be ‘mainstream’ and ‘big’.

So I’m slightly sceptical about new gadgets generally. My experience is that consumers are much more conservative than most PR-companies expect.

However, one thing I’ve seen recently has had certainly caught my attention.

It’s called a Readius (there is a youtube clip here) from Polymer Vision, and features a new type of display – one that folds. I use a PDA, but one of the things that irritates me is the size of the screen – I just can’t see everything I want to, particularly when using the Internet. The size of the screen is the major thing that affects portability as the screen can’t bend or fold – so I’m stuck with a few square inches to squint into.

That is until the Readius. This screen  folds out so you can read it – almost like paper. It means that for a smaller device than I carry now, I can have a bigger screen – offering the promise of a usable display that will fit in my suit pocket.

Right now the fold-out display is greyscale (fine for what I want) but features a very low power consumption footprint (battery life on my current HP PDA is not brilliant).

Of course, what would make this fly off the shelves of technology dealers is Internet capability – attaching the screen to a 3G phone to make a truly portable mobile Internet device with a decent, usable screen. Alas this is where the device falls down – it simply (at the moment) does not refresh fast enough to be used in this way, although it is promised for a couple of years time. As the price for the Readius seems to be in the order of USD800, it makes it a very expensive toy until it can access websites and comes attached to a device with a browser. In the meantime, I’m still interested enough to consider buying.

It will also be interesting to see what the reliability is like – will the folding lead to cracks and expensive warranty claims?

However, improving displays puts the focus on keyboards – or lack of keyboard. They are either like arcade games (Blackberry) or much too large to carry (Pocketop Wireless). Hopefully the people at Polymer Vision will come up with a solution soon to this.

Technorati Tags: gadget, readius

My post today is about something new in ITIL Version 3 – Service Requests. Actually, I say new, but Service Requests (SR) were actually in ITIL V2 (which most of you will be familiar with) but one of the welcome changes in ITIL Release 3 is to make the definition and role much clearer. An earlier V3 post is here.

A Service Request is defined thus:

A Service Request is a request from a user for advice, information, a routine change or access to some IT service.

The most obvious example of a Service Request is someone asking for a password reset – but it could be someone asking for some desktop application to be installed, or asking for login rights to some system or service. Generally, they are typified by relatively modest amounts of effort (by the Service Desk) to complete, and little risk to the business. If there is expenditure involved it’s usually modest or all agreed up-front.

In the past, many companies will have handled Service Requests as special types of Incidents, or as Changes – but defining them separately gives us an opportunity to have better reporting, and in some cases to reduce administrative time.

As in all cases there are a few downsides (which I think can be safely navigated with a little planning).

• There is the possibility of confusion between Incidents and SRs, and Changes and SRs. A little training and definition will hopefully overcome this.
• Service Request bring into focus the need to have help with determining which systems different Customers can reasonably request access to (and what they already have access to). You ‘ll be pleased to hear we are adding new functionality to help with this.
• Higher risk or more costly Changes being handled as SRs for administrative convenience – but again, with sufficient control this can be avoided.

We are changing Serio to meet this new or revised definition – some of the changes are actually quite significant and will be released as part of Serio Version 5. I’ll write about these later.

Technorati Tags: ITIL, Service Request

Back in October, I started to look at the next version of Microsoft’s server operating system – Windows Server 2008. In that post I concentrated on two of the new technologies – Server Core and Windows Server Virtualization (since renamed as Hyper-V).

For those who have installed previous versions of Windows Server, Windows Server 2008 setup will be totally new. Windows Vista users will be familiar with some of the concepts, but Windows Server takes things a step further with simplified configuration and role-based administration.

Using a technology known as Windows PE, the new setup model allows multiple builds to be stored in a single image (using the .WIM file format). Because many of these builds will share the same files, single instance storage is used to reduce the volume of disk space required, allowing six operating system versions to fit into one DVD image (with plenty of free space).

The first stage of the setup process is about collecting information. Windows Setup now asks fewer questions and instead of being spread throughout the process (anybody ever left a server installation running and then returned to find it had stopped half way through for input of some networking details?) the information is all gathered at this first stage in the process. After gathering details for the language, time and currency, keyboard, product key (which can be left and entered later), version of Windows to install, license agreement and selection of a disk on which to install the operating system (including options for disk management), Windows Setup is ready to begin the installation. Incidentally, it’s probably worth noting that SATA disk controllers have been problematic when setting up previous versions of Windows. Windows Server 2008 had no issues with the motherboard SATA controller on the Dell server that I used for my research.

After collecting information, Windows Setup moves on to the actual installation. This consists of copying files, expanding files (which took about 10 minutes on my system), installing features, installing updates, two reboots and completing installation. One final reboot brings the system up to the login screen after which Windows is installed. On my server (with a fast processor, but only 512MB of RAM) the whole process took around 20 minutes.

At this point you may be wondering where the computer name, domain name, etc. is entered. Windows Setup initially installs the server into a workgroup (called WORKGROUP) and uses an automatically generated computer name. The Administrator password must be changed at first logon, after which the desktop is prepared and loaded.

Windows Server 2003 included an HTML application called the Configure Your Server Wizard and service pack 1 added the post-setup security updates (PSSU) functionality to allow the application of updates before enabling non-essential services. In Windows Server 2008 this is enhanced with a feature called the Initial Tasks Configuration Wizard. This takes an administrator through the final steps in setup (or initial tasks in configuration):

1. Provide computer information – configure networking, change the computer name and join a domain.
2. Update this server – enable Automatic Updates and Windows Error Reporting, download the latest updates.
3. Customise this server – add roles or features, enable Remote Desktop, configure Windows Firewall (now enabled by default).

Roles and Features are an important change in Windows Server 2008. The enhanced role-based administration model provides a simple approach for an administrator to install Windows components and configure the firewall to allow access in a secure manner. At release candidate 1 (RC1), Windows Server 2008 includes 17 roles (e.g. Active Directory Domain Services, DHCP Server, DNS Server, Web Server, etc.) and 35 features (e.g. failover clustering, .NET Framework 3.0, Telnet Server, Windows PowerShell).

Finally, all of the initial configuration tasks can be saved as HTML for printing, storage, or e-mailing (e.g. to a configuration management system).

Although Windows Server 2008 includes many familiar Microsoft Management Console snap-ins, it includes a new console which is intended to act as a central point of administration – Server Manager. Broken out into Roles, Features, Diagnostics (Event Viewer, Reliability and Performance, and Device Manager), Configuration (Task Scheduler, Windows Firewall with Advanced Security, Services, WMI Control and Local Users and Groups)and Storage (Windows Server Backup and Disk Management), Server Manager provides most of the information that an administrator needs – all in one place.

It’s worth noting that the Initial Tasks Configuration Wizard and Server Manager do not apply for Server Core installations. Server Manager can be used to remotely administer a computer running Server Core, or hardcore administrators can configure the server from the command line.

So that’s Windows Server 2008 setup and configuration in a nutshell. Greatly simplified. More secure. Much faster.

Of course, there are options for customising Windows images and pre-defining setup options but these are beyond the scope of this article. Further information can be found elsewhere on the ‘net – I recommend starting with the Microsoft Deployment Getting Started Guide.

Windows Server 2008 will be launched on 27 February 2008. It seems unlikely that it will be available for purchase in stores at that time; however corporate users with volume license agreements should have access to the final code by then. In the meantime, it’s worth checking out Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 website and the Windows Server UK User Group.

• Looking forward to Windows Server 2008
• Windows 7 – Now you can pretend you’re in a Sci-Fi Movie when sending a memo to Accounts

This is just a very brief follow-up to Duncan’s last post, which mentions Known Errors but does not define them.

A Known Error is an output from Problem Management (or more accurately, your Problem Resolution process). For a definition of a problem, click here.

If you think of a Problem as being something you don’t understand, think of a Known Error as something you do understand – even if you don’t know yet how to fix it just yet.

In the case of a software bug, it would be after analysis of source code and algorithms. In the case of an infrastructure problem it is after carefully verifying the conditions necessary for repetition of the Problem and (ideally) identifying the faulty components.

Known Errors typically have two parts. The first of these is the description of the Known Error itself, showing users or product modules and versions affected. The second is the Workaround and/or Change:

• Workaround – a way to bypass the fault you’ve previous described that can be used by Customers.
• Change – to resolve the underlying Problem.

In practice, many support professionals people seem to raise Known Errors whenever any error condition or bug is proved as repeatable, rather waiting for the Problem to be diagnosed (fully understood). Also, many raise a Known Error even if a Workaround is not currently available – simply to help Incident logging staff.

Known Errors are used during the Incident logging and resolution process, as a source of Workarounds for customers, and as an information resource for Customer-facing Incident handling staff. Because of this, we’ve made it so that searching Known Errors is quick and painless from Incident logging in Serio Release 5.

• Serio Release 5 Update – PocketSerio-i and Known Errors
• Change Management – Defining the Process

This is an update to the earlier Release 5 post, with more information about new features.

Firstly, the new PocketSerio-i application is available for anyone that wants it on servers hosted at our offices in Livingston (in other words, there is nothing to install). PocketSerio-i allows you to action Incident and Changes (and amend the CMDB) through a web browser on a PDA. It supports any browser, so if you can browse the Internet through your PDA then you should be able to use it just fine. It’s designed for the very small screen and low connection speeds that PDAs typically have.

Things you can use it for a sending emails to customers through Serio (so they look and feel just like any other support email), making re-assignments and resolving tickets.

We’ve also added a single-line Issue Summary field to the logging form, so that you can add a pithy description to each Incident, Problem and Change you log. You can then add this to the subject line of emails you send to customers (which helps remind them what the email is about).

One area in which there has been a lot of Change is Known Errors. Previously, customers devised their own way of recording Known Errors – usually by means of Agent Status A or B.

This will still work just fine in Release 5, but we’ve brought the Known Error concept more directly into the tool. There is now a Chapter (under Tools) called ‘Known Errors’ which lists each and every Known Error in Serio, helpfully showing the Known Error Description and Workaround together.

As part of this, we’ve also extended the popular Service Status HTML web pages with Known Error pages – whenever you add or remove a Known Errors, these pages are updated.

Creation and deletion of Known Errors is now done directly via Action Extensions created specifically for that purpose. When creating a Known Error, you set the Known Error Description (which is defaulted to the ticket description, but can be amended independently) and add the Workaround details – and that’s it.

And one final thing, we’ve made it so that you can view Incidents, Problems and Changes all together in your queue if you wish.

• Defining Known Errors
• Serio Release 5 – Now that the Dust has settled a bit…
• Serio Release 6 – Sneek Preview