Serio IT Service Desk & Helpdesk Blog

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I’m prompted to write by this post by Jeff Dray over at Techrepublic on the subject of getting out and about once in a while – working temporarily in other (end-user) departments and locations.

My own experience is it can be very worthwhile, particularly if relations between the Helpdesk/Service Desk are a bit stained at times.

My own experience of this was after I’d taken over an IT Manager type-role at a Call Centre back in the 1990’s. The sales team (i.e., those people actually taking orders and enquiries from customers, remember there were no Internet online shops back then) hated the IT group of 8 staff with a passion, and were not slow in showing this to anyone and everyone in the company who would listen. The sales order processing system I inherited worked after a fashion, but had a tendency to lose orders – not many, but enough to cause a steady stream of calls from customers saying ‘where’s my stuff?’.

The root of the problem was that they felt that their problems and issues were not taken seriously enough, and dealt with quickly enough. On the IT side, the IT team was constantly struggling to keep-up with a constant stream of new campaigns.

It was the sales team that suggested that members of the Service Desk be seconded onto the phones, and to be honest their mood was such I thought it was better not to say no – regardless of how busy we were.

Over the next few weeks each of us took a 3-day stint as a sales representative working on different campaigns.

As it turned out, the sales team were right – we didn’t take their issues seriously enough, and we were not dealing with them quickly enough. The problem was that customers, not surprisingly, are not prepared to wait, get agitated and angry – and these had to be handled with the sales team, increasing stress levels all round. In many cases attention tomorrow was no use – it had to be today, often ‘right now’.

The interesting thing was that members of IT coming back to their regular jobs invariably said something like ‘we’ve got to do something’ or ‘no wonder they are always on the warpath’, and had a lot of useful suggestions as to how we could improve things until the sales order processing system was replaced at the end of the year.

The extra insight allowed changes in attitude and working that had a quite positive improvement, despite the high pressure nature of the environment.

In case you haven’t noticed, laptop computers have been getting ever more powerful, with bigger and more impressive screens, and ever bigger discs. The laptop used quite commonly here at Serio are variants of the Toshiba Satellite Pro.

Whilst it’s OK, it is not any more portable that the old Compaq portables I had over 5 years ago. In fact, I suspect it’s a bit heavier and for certain, the battery doesn’t last as long.

That’s where ASUS have came in with their EEE PC. Whereas laptop computers have typically sacrificed weight and battery life for features, ASUS have decided to try to create something that is literally not a pain in the neck by going for portability and battery life. My new 901 weighs 1Kg and is about slightly larger than a paperback novel, as shown below.

Early versions of the ASUS suffered from poor connectivity, and were fiddly to use. With the EEE 901, most of these niggles are resolved.

To help users on the move, it doesn’t have a conventional hard disc – ie, a mechanical one with a disc that spins. Instead it has a virtual 12GB (20GB on Linux) hard disc that is actually implemented in Solid State RAM, called a Solid State Shockproof Drive. It’s something useful if you use the computer in environments where jolts are commonplace, like the Stansted Airport to Liverpool St Stansted Express I travelled on last week. The chance of a jolt damaging the disc is practically nil.

The screen is about 8 inches across and the resolution is 1024 x 600. It’s readable, and you’ll find yourself able to read most web pages and emails, but it does feel small. However, as the only alternative is a physically larger device, I’ll have it the way it is.

The keyboard is, for me, the worst aspect. Maybe you just have to get used to it, but every sentence I type has a typo (nothing new there then), and the all important number pad keys like home and end are difficult to use. The feel of the keys is also not good, one just seems to merge in with the next.

There are two versions of the EEE 901. One machine comes installed with Linux, and one with Windows XP. The linux version has had some issues with connecting to wireless networks but the XP version seems OK.

The battery life is a claimed 8 hours. I’m not sure what you have to do to get that, but certainly 5 hours can be expected (way ahead of most laptops).

On the whole, I think it’s great. When you are carrying it it’s like you’ve forgotten your computer it is so light, and because the battery life is so good you don’t need to carry the power supply around so much.

An alternative take on the ASUS eee is here (the earlier 701).

One of many areas of change and development in ITIL V3 has been the Service Catalogue, something that I’m going to blog about today. This post is targeted at those new to Service Catalogues, and I hope I’ll make the standard text somewhat less abstract.

First a recap on what the Service Catalogue is. It’s a portfolio of services that is offered by the IT Service Management function to the business. It defines the business functions that use these services and how important they are, it defines the costs of these services, who uses them (which can be individual users, departments or companies), and ideally attempts to define some measures about the quality of service that can be expected.

Some of advantages for companies taking up IT Service Management for the 1st time listed below, but I’d single out the change in focus from being a reactive service desk to one whose culture is geared towards service provision.

There are two parts to a Service Catalogue: The Business Service Catalogue, and the Technical Service Catalogue.

Business Service Catalogue (BSC)

Think of this as the strategic view – ‘the what’. It describes the service, the business functions that it supports, and the user groups that use it. This is the part of the Service Catalogue you are most likely to show to customers. You might include in the BSC:

• Cost of the service (to users), and how paid for
• Service Level Agreement Information
• User groups using the service
• Quality measures or KPIs

Technical Service Catalogue

This is the implementation view – ‘the how’. This is where we describe, for each Service listed in the Business Service Catalogue, how the Service is put-together or delivered. Your Technical Service Catalogue might include:

• Links and references to other services which are essential for delivery of this service
• Configuration Items (http://www.seriosoft.com/Blog/?p=14) which will be pieces of equipment, software, servers and so on.
• Startup and Shutdown procedures
• Recovery and fallback information
• Key support contracts and contact points

Example Business Service Catalogue Entry

What follows is a simple, cut-down example of a single entry in the BSC, in the hope of making things less abstract.

In the sales-order system shown below there would be a web component, taking orders directly from customers. In many cases these Services (which really are subsystems) are actually shown as Services in their own right, with their own SLA and BSC entry. One of your jobs in developing the Service Catalogue is to define these boundaries intelligently.

Service Name: Sales Order Processing System (informally known as TOPS).

Description (Overview): Provides functionality to take a small-value order from a customer, typically less than £250, either via telephone or the on-line shopping website, process payment, allow the product to be picked and packed at the warehouse, and sent to the customer.

Special Notes: Outbound calls are not part of this service.

User groups:

Sales Order processing Agents (20 approx).

These Agents handle customer sales enquiries, complaints.
Business function: Processing of high volume, low value orders.
Main user contact: {show name and contact details}

{List the rest of the user groups}

Third Party Support Details:

{ Record details of any 3rd-party supplier contracts, including terms of service and contact telephone numbers}

Service Level Requirements:

• Minimum transaction time, selection of single widget item into sale: 0.5 seconds
• Minimum credit card authority: 5 seconds
• Minimum pick/pack process selection: 10 seconds
• Minimum order commit and confirm: 3 seconds
• Availability requirement: 08:30 to 17:30 Mon-Fri, availability target 99.5%
• { Other elements of your SLA might be included, as you’ve negotiated with the customer}

Cost of Service

{ Describe how the service is funded, either centrally from overheads, directly from the user group, per transaction and so on}

Monitoring

{ If you have established automated or manual monitoring of the Service, then describe them here.}

Reporting Cycle

{ Describe how often reports will be produced, who they will be created for, and what the reports will show. You might want to define Key Performance Indicators for the Service here. }

Benefits of Having a Service Catalogue

• Focuses IT Service Management teams onto deliverable Services for Customers
• Provides a central resource for everyone in the organisation regarding the services delivered, how they are used, their importance for customers and levels of quality expected
• Documents minimum quality and service levels for both the benefit of customers and IT service delivery staff

Hopefully, I’ll follow this with a post on where this information would be stored in Serio.

Technorati Tags: ITIL, Service Catalogue

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