TRANSFORMING A HELPDESKINTO AN ITIL SERVICE DESK

Jack Schmidt and Mark KaletkaFermilabNLIT 2009

Agenda Helpdesk Assessment IT Service Management Assessment Building the Service Desk What We Did Well What We Could Have Done Better Next Steps

Helpdesk Evolution

Computer Room Ops

ARS to Assist

Operators

24 x7 Automatic

Alerts

Single Point of Contact

Helpdesk Assessment Request Management initiated review to

improve service Why doesn’t the tool work as expected? Do we have the correct skill set? Where are the metrics?

Helpdesk Assessment Findings Unstructured customer support

mechanism Helpdesk lives in email Drive-by / Walk-Ins

Low customer confidence Scientists frustrated with response times

Repetitive Incidents No proactive problem management

Helpdesk Assessment Findings Uncoordinated and unrecorded changes

No defined processes for making changes. Notification of Helpdesk an afterthought.

Lack of scale Helpdesk morphed over years Homegrown tool based around Remedy

workflow engine

Helpdesk Assessment Recommendations Follow ITIL Best Practices to create a

Service Desk Stop living in email! Upgrade Remedy Workflow to ITSM

software with Incident Management tool

But… Issues with getting started… New management requirements:

Changed scope of improvement from Helpdesk to all of IT, with a concentration on ‘classic’ IT Services

ISO20000 (International Standard for IT Service Management) certification

ISO20K Assessment Findings ISO20k certification possible in ~2.5

years (with help) Many areas of tribal knowledge Pockets of excellence Consolidation of redundant areas of IT

support will free up resources

Iso20K Assessment Recommendations Use consultants to guide process design

and configure tools Use Fermilab staff for process owners Use Fermilab staff to help define and

implement processes

What Is a Service Desk? Objectives

Provide a single point of contact for the users

Facilitate the restoration of service within agreed service levels

Provide an interface for other activities such as Change, Problem, Configuration, Release, Service Level, Availability and Capacity Management

What Is a Service Desk? Functions

Record and track incidents and service requests

Keep customers informed on request status and progress

Assess, attempt to resolve or refer Close incident and follow up with customers Proactively keep users informed of all

service outages, changes or improvements

Service Desk Game Plan

Prepare Workshop Choose Incident Management

Owner/Service Desk Manager Install tool Identify workshop participants

Subject Matter Experts Make decisions Agent of Change

Conduct WorkshopWhat is the Vision?

High Level Business Objectives

Where are we now? Assessments

Where do we want to be?

Measurable Targets

How do we get where we want to be?

Process Improvement

How do we check our milestones have been

reached?

Measurements and Metrics

How do we keep the momentum going?

Develop Policies & Procedures Identify Business Requirements Define process and procedures to

restore services Guidance to communicate new

processes Defines policy to enable a consistent

repeatable process

Deploy Process/Configure Tool Configure tool with requirements gathered from

workshop Provide tool and process training Hold simulations to test tool and process Communications:

Posters Electronic articles Announce at major meetings

Staff Increase staff size Plenty of technical support for Go-Live

What we did well Hired a Service Desk/Incident Management

Manager Provide ITIL training for key personnel Involved the right people in the workshop! Trained support people on tool usage Increased Service Desk Staff Followed defined processes and procedures Implement process improvement

procedures

What we could have done better More Process and Tool Training Build reporting structure early Staged rollout Follow up on open tickets immeadiately Better explanation of future

enhancements

Next Steps Self Service support Provide central notification

infrastructure Service Level Agreements into the

Service Desk tool Schedule of Changes Develop Knowledge base

Questions?