Standardize the Service Desk

Improve customer service by driving consistency in your support approach and meeting SLAs.

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Organizations do not have a standard service desk practice to meet the requirements of their business and end users.

  • Teams often know changes need to happen but it’s difficult to know where to start. The service desk team is often in firefighting mode and finds it difficult to find the time to proactively improve processes. However, putting off service desk standardization puts other improvements at risk as well, including plans to embrace new technologies, which risk moving poor processes into new solutions.

The service desk is the entry point for users to get help. IT must ensure the first line of interaction has the knowledge and tools they need to resolve quickly and preferably on first contact.

  • Focus on standardizing and driving consistency on the service desk to be able to optimize support and improve interfacing processes.
  • Without standardized processes, organizations become a mass of confusion, redundancies, and cost overruns. Standardization prevents wasting energy on reinventing solutions to recurring issues.

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Onsite Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn’t enough, we offer low-cost onsite delivery of our Project Workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a road map in place to complete your project successfully.

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Member Rating

9.5/10
Overall Impact

$62,224
Average $ Saved

28
Average Days Saved

After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve.

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Case Studies and Deliverables

Service Desk SOP for an Energy Company

With a new service desk tool coming in the following week, the organization wanted to formalize their service desk processes to ensure all requirements were met, and create a formal document to move forward with.


Service Desk SOP for a Public Sector Organization

Increasing staff and an organizational need to improve the maturity of the service desk meant IT had to rebuild its service desk to ensure all requests were handled efficiently and effectively.


Service Desk Case Study of Olmsted Medical Center

Over the years, 16 groups had emerged within Olmsted Medical Center that provided IT service desk support to employees, visitors, and patients. Info-Tech Research Group delivered a five-day Service Desk Optimization workshop to design an optimum structure for the target state service desk, consolidating the 16 disparate entities into a single organization.


Module 1: Lay service desk foundations

The Purpose

Define current state and develop a service desk vision. Define service desk structure and ticket intake.

Key Benefits Achieved

Alignment on goals for workshop. Improved service desk structure and ticket intake and triage.

Activities: Outputs:
1.1 Assess current state of the service desk.
  • Current state assessment.
1.2 Review service desk structure and shift-left strategy.
  • Shift-left strategy and implications.
  • Roles and responsibilities.
1.3 Identify service desk metrics and reports.
  • Service desk metrics and reports.
1.4 Identify ticket handling procedures.

Module 2: Design incident management

The Purpose

Capture and report on the right data. Improve incident resolution.

Key Benefits Achieved

  • Establish the foundation needed to capture useful data through effective ticket categories and metrics that enable continuous improvement.
  • Documented and improved incident management workflow.

Activities: Outputs:
2.1 Build incident and critical incident management workflows.
  • Incident and critical incident management workflows.
2.2 Design ticket categorization scheme and proper ticket handling guidelines.
  • Ticket categorization scheme.
2.3 Design incident escalation and prioritization guidelines.
  • Ticket escalation and prioritization guidelines.

Module 3: Design request fulfilment

The Purpose

Improve service request fulfillment and enable shift-left.

Key Benefits Achieved

  • Clear differentiation between standard service and non-standard service requests and projects.
  • Established process for building out and maintaining an internal and external knowledge base.
  • Increased self-service options.

Activities: Outputs:
3.1 Build service request workflows.
  • Distinguishing criteria for requests and projects.
  • Service request workflows and SLAs
3.2 Build a targeted knowledge base.
  • Knowledge base article template, processes, and workflows.
3.3 Prepare for a self-serve portal project.

Module 4: Build project implementation plan

The Purpose

Communicate and implement the vision for a standardized service desk.

Key Benefits Achieved

  • Align on the vision for the next steps of the service desk.
  • Develop effective messaging for key stakeholders.

Activities: Outputs:
4.1 Build implementation roadmap.
  • Project communication plan and workshop summary presentation.
4.2 Build communication plan.
  • Project implementation and task list.
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