These days many Service Desk Managers are trying to encourage their customers to use self-help, or log their calls via the web. Despite this, the main contact method used to log calls with most Service Desks remains the telephone. This means that how the Service Desk team go about handling their calls to meet targets and handle fluctuating call volumes is very important.

Typically a Service Desk Manager has to balance several factors in considering how to manage the length of calls received by the Service Desk, including:

Most IT managers are coming to realise that in the 21st century IT needs to focus on providing services. Technology facilitates the provides of IT services, rather than being an end goal in itself.

What does this mean for the measurement of the performance of IT departments or external IT service providers?

Well, it means that all your measures should come back to how effectively you are delivering services that meet the needs of your customers, and how satisfied they are with the provision of those services.

This is a good question faced by many Service Desk Managers. How do you reduce or clear a backlog when you cannot simply throw more resources at it? It is a challenge I myself have faced.

Here's some approaches that can be mixed and matched as appropriate to your organisation to make a difference.

1. Implement measures and approaches to increase 1st Call Resolution.
a) Set a target/SLA, measure it daily for the month to date and report back to the team.
b) Publicly praise the Analyst(s) resolving the most calls.

Every time there's an IT incident, there's an impact on IT's resources and on IT's reputation. Service Desk or Help Desk staff get involved, 2nd level support get involved, managers get involved (when there's a big stuff up or there's an escalation) and, no matter how you look at it, the customer is disrupted.

Every incident carries the risk of IT's reputation being eroded and confidence in IT being lost.

Organisations sometimes stumble at the first hurdle with Problem Management, for one of several reasons:

a) Where do we start?
b) Biting of more than they can chew. "This Problem Management book is huge!"
c) Lack of a Problem Management module in their ITSM/Service Desk/CRM toolset.

Now, in an ideal world you would like to have an ITSM toolset in place with an integrated Problem Management module, but, and I must stress this, it is not an absolute pre-requisite.

In Stephen Covey’s ‘7 habits of highly effective people’ he refers to an exhausted man trying ineffectively to saw down a tree. When asked why he doesn’t stop to sharpen his saw, the man replies “I don’t have time to sharpen the saw, I’m too busy sawing!”. In my experience, there are many IT teams out there who are like the man with the blunt saw – they don’t take the time to improve their processes and tools and this leads to staff burn-out and declining IT performance.

These days, an IT department simply delivering the latest shiny new technology is no longer enough. Communicating to set expectations, and then actively working to meet those expectations, is now a critically important part of delivering a good service to IT’s customers. Indeed, it is an important aspect of good customer service in almost any scenario. Think of an example of good service you’ve received in a restaurant or when having your car serviced, and of bad service: setting and meeting expectations may well have played a part.

The Service Desk is the face of IT to the business. This is or should be true in most IT organisations. Its importance to the IT support structure and the perception of the service provided by IT is often made or broken by the impression delivered by the Service Desk from the very first call. Not only are they the key customer facing body, but also, as we all know, “first impressions last”. Traditionally the importance of the Service Desk team, however, has been underestimated, presumably because the critical IT Service Desk Analyst role itself is perceived as a junior role.

As an IT manager, there is one performance improvement discipline that, when done well, will reliably lead to improved service, increased productivity, reduced costs, and improve almost any IT KPI you can think of...

I know that's a pretty big claim, so let's cut to the chase - the discipline is human performance management. The one thing you can do to significantly improve the performance of your IT team is to do a better job of managing the performance of your staff. With nothing but the investment of time, the performance improvement benefits can be huge and here's why:

Sitting on a Melbourne tram recently, I overheard an amusing conversation between two tram drivers. They'd been talking for a while about driving trams, how many years of tram driving experience they'd had, and how it wasn't like the good old days etc, when one of them said:

"I love driving trams. You know, this job would be perfect if it wasn't for the passengers".