Helpdesk and Business Support

Information technology service management and support at scale.

Overview

Program Roadmap

We care about delivering a personal touch for end-users. This can be achieved by building great feedback systems, a well defined portfolio of service, and a team that understands the needs of the customer.

Build a Service Portfolio

A roadmap requires a start and an end. For technology service management, organizations generally need to group the activities they perform for customers into clear categories of service that can measured. Initiatives can then be structured to improve the request and fulfillment processes, timeliness, and customer satisfaction.

Our Approach

Building or improving a portfolio of technology services in an organization is a cross-functional process. Our team works to assess the existing technology landscape of an organization and then provides the required documentation and standard operating procedures to request, fulfill, and measure service delivery. This typically includes but is not limited to:

Creation of help topics or configuration items
Developing or managing an inventory list of current hardware and software vendors
Mapping of support towers and support leads, escalations points, and/or approvers
Discovering existing procurement, compliance, risk, and security needs or frameworks
Building awareness of technology guidance and end-user agreements from Human Resources
Engaging departmental knowledge capture and documentation
Reviewing or establishing operational run books
Evaluating end-user technical knowledge and assessing training needs

Define Your Service Levels

A service management organization always needs to prioritize work, set expectations for timeliness, and be aware of the business impact to the end-user. This can be achieved by creating Service Level Agreements or SLAs.

A well defined SLA in technology service management focuses on defining response times and response quality to requests and incidents. This enables customers and service managers a way to set clear performance benchmarks, allocate support resources, and provide robust reporting for strategic decision making.

Our Approach

SLA-driven service management organizations operate like a business unit; we can view an SLA as a miniature business plan. Our team focuses on authoring SLAs that target and mitigate service management risk. These business controls provide a foundation for our team to implement common service management frameworks like Information Technology Infrastructure Management (ITIL), Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT) and numerous others.

Core SLA elements include, but are not limited to:

Coverage availability, normal hours of operation
Prioritization, response time, and resolution for Requests
Prioritization, response time, resolution time, and business impact classification of Incidents
Major incident management operations and continuity planning
Documented services, processes and maturity models
Resource budgeting and staffing
Performance level acceptance criteria
Communications planning and call center agent scripting
Run and knowledge management procedures
Customer demographic collection and analysis

Develop a Knowledgebase

Organizations commonly experience challenges with documenting knowledge and making it communicable in a consistent, secure, and permission-based manner. This creates three levels of complexity: 1) classification of documented knowledge, 2) understanding how the knowledge should be communicated (e.g. written, audio record, video record, coded or other), and, 3) determining who should have access to the knowledge document.

Building a knowledgebase requires that knowledge managers resolve these questions. As well, it exposes opportunities for authorized end-users to browse available knowledge in specific knowledge classifications or domains. Common examples include:

An accounting specialist accessing excel formulas for address parsing for a particular accounting product
An executive reviewing incident resolution notes on an outage of a vendor’s system during a service level audit
A digital marketing associate reviewing personalization rules for a microsite
A contracted graphic designer accessing the most recently approved brand guidelines

Our Approach

A knowledgebase is a living product: for technology service management engagements, our team designs and deploys a knowledge capture plan that typically includes the below activities:

Knowledgebase platform selection, configuration, and deployment
End-user focus groups on knowledge and skills gaps on software and hardware
Project-based knowledge capture plan for new system design and implementations
Discovery of historical request resolution narratives and incident corrective and preventative actions
Awareness SaaS and cloud technology service levels, documentation, and status monitoring documentation

Contact Us

Free Readiness Assessment

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Content

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