Serio IT Service Desk & Helpdesk Blog

It’s easy to overlook training.

I can think of a few occasions in my career, particularly during spell I had of short term contract work, where I’d show up for work on a Monday and the Service Delivery Manager would seem quite surprised, usually muttering something along the lines of ‘I thought you weren’t due till next week’.

Out of a handful of contracts, the average training time I received was 4 hours (a morning usually) and included in that was the dull and often pointless company induction video or a presentation by the HR department. I was usually on the phones dealing with customers before the end of the day.

And it showed. On the whole I think I coped quite well (but then I would say that), however the fact is customers were aware they we speaking to ‘the new guy’ – and often took the time to explain things carefully to me.

There are many things wrong with this approach slap-dash approach. Here are two of them.

Firstly, it is bad for customers because it’s hard for the new start to understand what the problem might be (and sometime understand the specialist terms they are using), it’s impossible to resolve the Incident first time and often impossible to ask the right questions for 2nd line support. There’s a negative effect on quality that ripples right through service delivery.

Secondly, the new start can’t but help to have a poor initial impression of his new manager and employer. Chances are they’ll say ‘my boss is an idiot’ if asked.

So, long before you recruit anyone you need a training and induction programme for the Helpdesk/Service Desk person you are recruiting.

The form this takes will vary. For instance:

- A training course on the products you support, if you are supporting a single groups of products or services – including sending the new recruit on your customer-focussed training course (even if this is days rather than hours in length).

- Whatever you do, don’t just say ‘have a play with Product X’ if for whatever reason no training course is available. Instead, set measurable goals that will test learning and understanding.

- If you are engaged in more general IT support, make sure the new recruit is aware of the services you are supporting and has access to your Service Catalog.

- Don’t expect the employee’s call handling and customer handling skills to come complete and perfect. These skills can be honed, as I’ve mentioned here.

A really good idea is to consider role-plays before any customer exposure. Take 5 or 6 typical cases ranging from easy to difficult, go into another room, and make the calls. This will also help to test how well they can use your ITSM tool.

Most importantly, add training time to the budget allocated for the new employee. It will help you understand what you are losing if staff aren’t sticking around for very long – something I’ll write about next week.

Technorati Tags: ITSM, IT Recruitment

• Handling Difficult Helpdesk/Service Desk Customers
• Career Progression for your Helpdesk and Service Desk Staff
• Establishing a 24-Hour Helpdesk or Service Desk

Don’t Oversell Availability, warns Peter Warren.

You’ve maybe never heard of S3, but the chances are you’ve used a website that uses it either wholly or in part in the last month.

S3 is Simple Storage Service – web content hosting on steriods, and is provided by Amazon. It is used by services like the excellent Twitter, Smugmug and Pownce, and thousands more. It’s key selling points are its low cost and high availability – and at the end of last week it suffered a fairly substantial amount of downtime.

As a user myself, I’ve been surprised by the reaction of the S3 user community who view this like it is the end of the on-line world as we know it. In fact, the service was down for less than 3 hours.

Many users seem to have taken the marketing speak about “ensuring that the data will always be available when you need it” and the reassurances about redundant copies of data on different servers (the much hyped ‘cloud’) at face value – and have taken 100% uptime as the minimum that they should expect.

Personally I always view these claims in the same way as claims like ‘this ship is unsinkable’ – it always seems companies lack the imagination to understand where the critical weak-point is. In this case, S3 may (according to some rumours) have suffered a good old-fashioned Denial of Service (DoS) Attack – its authentication server got a gazillion requests and could not keep up. The 3 hour downtime was how long it took Amazon to create extra capacity.

My complaint is really about the way Amazon dealt with this, and I think this might be what is at the root of some customer ill-feeling (some customers seem to be downright unreasonable though).

I got a call in the small hours of the morning to say our website was down. Working from home it was clear that some important files hosted on S3 were inaccessible, but there was nothing from their Helpdesk that I could find on the support site to say either that Amazon knew something was up, or if they did know when it would be back.

This meant I had little of value to say to our own customers.

It took a note on the user forum before we got any word from Amazon. Frankly that’s not good enough.

Many users are now asking for service status information. I hope they provide this soon.

I guess the moral of the story is: don’t oversell availability, practice your customer response for when the inevitable unavailability occurs, and be very open. After all, I have Service Status pages, why don’t they?

Peter Warren is a guest blogger. 

Technorati Tags: Availability, S3

• Availability Reporting Round-Up

I’ve written previously about some of the changes in ITIL V3 – and in particular Service Requests. My post today is about one of the really nice enhancements in Serio Release 5 to help customers cope better with Service Requests (which can include low-risk, high-volume mini Changes).

The objective was to create something that would help Agents step through a series of steps, offer guidance on what to do, and show others where the SR was in relation to completion – and be simple to set-up and use.

So, we’ve added something called Checklists. Checklists are really simple, and will be available in both the Serio Helpdesk and Serio Service Desk products.

Think of Checklists as Change Management Light.

The role of the Checklist is to present those working with Service Requests (as well as Incidents, Problems and Changes if you so wish) with:

• A tick list of tasks (called Jobs) that they have to do in order to resolve the ticket.
• Help and guidance on how to complete these Jobs.
• Reminders as to what they’ve done, and what they need to do next
• A means whereby the ticket can’t be closed until the Checklist is either finished or cancelled.

One additional design goal was simplicity – and I think that’s certainly been met. Setting-up a new Checklist takes just minutes, and is easy to amend when you need to. I made a Checklist this morning for making tea in about 10 minutes.

The screenshot below shows how my ‘tea’ Checklist looks when you’re using the tool. Notice also that the instructions for each Job in the Checklist can have a rich text description.

[Checklist Screenshot]

Checklists are started, actioned and completed via Actions – so you can usefully combine them with other things like Reminders, email and so on.

You can also use Checklists within existing Change Plans – something you might want to do if you need to make your existing Change Plan Templates simpler (by using Checklists within each Task).

Also includes as part of this enhancement are some new Columns for your Issue Display:

- Checklist Name
- Checklist Status (In-Progress, Completed or Cancelled)
- Current Job
- Date and time last Job was completed

and we’ve also added a Checklist search option to queries.

I’m asked to write today for a customer who is taking their first steps with Problem Management – in particular, I’m asked to write about practical strategies for Problem resolution. We have other Problem Management resources, such as a white paper and blog posts here, here and here.

So what do I mean by practical strategies? Something that is apparently not obvious to all engineers – I have a problem, how do I resolve it (or more accurately, get to the bottom of it)? I’m going to assume that the Problem Description is accurate and complete, and that you’ve got access to an accurate CMDB.

1. Use the Internet wisely.

For some Problems (but not all), engineers will be using the Internet. Searching the internet is not as straight forward as it sounds. Keep these tips in mind.

- Use different search engines. Results can vary widely, and some search engines (like Google) place less emphasis on-page factors (such as titles and content) than they do on links. Others, like live.com, place somewhat more emphasis on on page content.

So, make sure that if you don’t find what you are looking for on Google, try Yahoo or live.com.
- Know how to perform advanced searching. For example, suppose you are trying to search a vendor website for an error message, but find that there is either no search mechanism on the site, or that the vendor website search mechanism returns poor results. Did you know that you can use internet search engines to search the site? (I almost never use a website’s built-in search mechanism).

For instance, to search for the word kpi on seriosoft.com, you can type this into your favourite search engine:

site:seriosoft.com kpi

and you will get results only from seriosoft.com with the term kpi. Similarly, to search for a phrase such as “Incident Management” you can use

site:seriosoft.com “incident management”

The site command works on Google, Yahoo and Live.

2. Maintain a list of useful web sites, organised by topic. This is a perfect candidate for a Knowledgebase document.

3. Identify the right expert forums, and participate.

Take the time to find the best expert newsgroups and forums for your particular technical discipline. Most of these are free, although a few do require a small fee for registration. This gives you a chance to discuss issues with others, and from experience more people will take the time to reply to your questions if you are seen to be helping others.

4. Always try to replicate the error.

In my experience this is something that not everyone does, but it’s usually worthwhile. For some situations it’s not practical, but most of the time it is. Even if the error is not repeatable that in itself is a fact worth knowing and recording.

5. Maintain test systems in advance of actually needing them.

If you do this you’ll save a lot of time in trying to replicate errors and you’ll be quicker in devising workarounds.

6. Make sure the Problem Management team know about groups.google.com – it’s an excellent (searchable) usenet archive.

Technorati Tags: ITIL, Problem Management

• Incident Resolution and Quality
• Strategies for Incident Backlogs

This is a continuation of last weeks post Making a Start with ITSM Reporting.

I mentioned First Time Fix Rate then as a measure of quality.

Staying with this theme of measures of quality for the Helpdesk or Service Desk, have a look at your telephone statistics. Examine how long it takes the phone to get answered, and what your call abandonment rate is at different times of day. Also check when calls are actually coming in – if there is a gap (say calls start as 8:00am but your service does not start until 9:00am it might mean you should re-examine your SLA).

Next take a look at your backlog. By backlog, I mean the number of unresolved or active tickets you have at the start of your reporting interval when compared with the number at the end – this can be looked at for Incidents, Problems or Changes depending on what processes you are actually running.

In Serio, there are lots of ways to get this but probably the easiest is from running some of the Executive Summary reports (for example, Report ES1). Aside from getting this data for your current period you can also go back 3 months, and determine if the trend is neutral, rising or falling – and then draw conclusions or take action as appropriate.

So far, if you taken all of this data, you’ve got a measure of quality of service from your front-facing teams, and a very broad measure of throughput through the system. Now let’s look at the ‘back-end’ – those resolving tickets.

Staying with easily-available statistics, you can look at time-to-fix data (which is mainly focused on Incidents). This kind of data is simply a measure of how long it takes, in working time, to get from an Incident being logged to it being resolved. Again there are lots of ways to access this – in SerioReports, have a look at the SLA Analysis reports – or if you want less detailed data, you’ll find it also in the Executive Summary reports I mentioned earlier. For example, you could run Report SLA5 which is a simple results-against-target analysis, or run a time distribution report like SLA12.

The point of these reports it that is a measure of how much time it takes to resolve an Incident – and allows you to check that what you’ve agreed with your customers is what is actually being achieved. If you don’t have an agreement with your customers (you have no Service Level Agreement of any kind) right now, create some targets for yourself and your team – and then measure your performance against these along with creating a Service Level Management process to go with them.

Other data that can be revealing is customer satisfaction survey data. You can ask Serio (and many other ITSM tools) to gather this for you as you resolve tickets, and provides a way to guage customer perceptions of the service you are providing.

In these posts I’ve tried quite hard to focus on easily available data, and to write for someone getting started. More mature ITSM environments might include this data but would probably also include Availability (see the Availability white paper), costs of downtime, Problem and Change metrics, and a more detailed SLA analysis.

Technorati Tags: ITSM, Helpdesk

• Service Desk/Helpdesk Metrics Health Check
• Measuring the Performance of Helpdesk/Service Desk Teams and Agents
• Measuring the Performance of Helpdesk/Service Desk Team and Agents – Part 2