Question:

How do you schedule your service desk staff to ensure excellent staffing and achieve service-level targets? Does your service desk solution cover this?

Answer:

The effective staffing of service desk analysts can be complicated. Leveraging historic volume levels for all of the communication channels is one way to plan ahead. Additionally, having insight into planned projects from other groups — e.g., upgrades of applications or other planned releases — is important as well to plan ahead. 

Service desk teams should start automating the workforce management process as much as possible in order to meet the customers’ expectations. Some service desk solutions have the workforce management as part of their functionalities already. If this is a challenge for you today — make sure that you include this key requirement into your functionality assessment list. Use the ITSM Support Tools Product Comparison tool for your assessment. 

In the past week I have been briefed by one vendor who has incorporated workforce management into their solution. helpLine 5.1 Workforce Management allows for optimized planning of the service desk team.

Over the past two years, the economy has forced IT departments to downsize, sometimes cutting their budgets to the bone. Priorities and processes had to be reevaluated, and one of the main tenets of ITSM — do more with less — became an imperative with teeth. With the economy motivating this drive to do more with less, it may have come as an unwanted change. But it’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, the folks on the “O” side of Forrester’s I&O team have long been focused on how you can reduce your IT costs through automation and industrialization — essentially, how to do more with less.

But now IT budgets are springing back, which may tempt some to stray from the path of IT service management. We urge you to resist this temptation. Our research shows that in 2010, most of the I&O budget is being spent on new infrastructure, not personnel. This means you're still having to do more with less, and to do this you need to focus on process. In fact, we want you to focus on process and industrializing your operations so much, we’ve built our holiday wish list around it.

The Ten Things We Want For The Holidays (and The Ten Things You Need To Improve Your IT Service Management )

• True active executive commitment
  • To achieve real results, you need to have CIO-level support.
• Behavior change – discipline of IT service management
  • To launch a successful program, you need to educate and enforce.

Recently I published a business service management (BSM) case study on AMERICAN SYSTEMS. If you're interested in BSM, I highly recommend reading through this report. Although there are many known business alignment success stories, AMERICAN SYSTEMS takes business alignment a step further by aligning IT elements in a way that truly supports its business goals. AMERICAN SYSTEMS sought to improve the delivery and quality of its services to the business, something they were able to accomplish by introducing ITIL and COBIT standards and deploying integrated data center management software. In all, they were able to gain situational awareness, preempt and respond to issues more efficiently, and better protect information assets.

I've outlined a few key highlights from this report below:

First off, AMERICAN SYSTEMS is a government IT innovator that provides engineering, technical, and managed services to government customers. In order to meet the needs of their clients' constant demand for new and better services, they decided to shift from a reactive to a proactive way of managing and operating.

When they set out to make changes they outlined several goals: