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Developing a Strategic Support Plan
10/20/2005
There are many arguments for campuswide help desk consolidation; herewith, a few of the best.
A CALL FOR SUPPORT comes into a university IT group, and is reported to three or more different operating units of the department. All three units assign the case to one of their staff members, who each takes a different approach to analyzing the problem. Some, perhaps all, of the assigned staffers conclude that the issue really isn’t in their area of responsibility, and close their files. All assume that someone else will take care of the problem and inform the user as to problem resolution status.
Or…Perhaps the case is reported directly to two or three different resources, all of whom devote some time and energy to resolving the problem. When each reports back to the caller, they then discover that another group has already handled the matter.
Or…A very senior IT staff member is pulled away to respond to a reported issue, and finds herself running around the campus to get the basic information required to define the problem. In the meantime, the progress of a vital implementation project is threatened by the loss of her time.
Or…A local “guru” decides to “help” a colleague install an application or make changes to an environment. In the process, oops! The system stops working. Additional guru help is invoked, along with assistance from one or more campus help desks, each attempting various fixes. Unfortunately, no guru or help desk resource is aware of the “contributions” the others have made.
Sound familiar? It should. These and other unpleasant scenarios are often discussed (and have been for years) whenever IT support people get together. What’s a harried IT Support executive to do? Let’s examine how one school addressed the underlying issues.
Evaluate and Change
King’s College (PA) is a small, Roman Catholic institution in Wilkes-Barre, with a student body of 2,200 full- and part-time students. Not long ago, the college’s CIO, Paul Moran, put together a project team to evaluate the role and process of the IT help desk. The assignment: to come up with a proposal for dealing with a range of perceived strategic and tactical issues.
The team met weekly to talk about scope, technology, hours of operation, staffing, definition of what services could be offered, quality levels, and process. Recognizing that all technology carries asupport burden, the team worked to balance the need for support against the pool of available resources. The final report and proposal was submitted six months later, and was accepted.
The key strategic points covered by the report included the establishment of a single, campuswide point of contact for all support, and implementing a robust tracking system to both manage all cases and capture the vital data that would enable management of the department, staffing levels and skill sets, and overall quality.
Single Point of Contact
Early on, the team saw that all of the various existing support channels needed to be consolidated into a single point of contact for students, faculty, and administration. The recommendation was that all incoming requests would be entered into a case-tracking system, to which the entire organization would have access. A tiered organizational structure was designed, and escalation policies and procedures were drafted as part of the team’s report.
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