Improving Your Service Desk Starts With A Gap Analysis

Improving your incident management is a critical way to decrease downtime, resulting in improved productivity and revenue. While there are a variety of ways that IT incident managers can lose control of these situations, the best way to identify weaknesses is to look at your existing processes.

This three-step process starts by examining your current procedures to look for weaknesses in your incident management.

Identifying Gaps In Your Process

Procedures underlie everything on an IT service desk. It’s critical to continuously analyze your incident management processes to see where issues and gaps exist.

Triage tends to be the most common issue, with the wrong person on the service desk getting a call. This represents the lowest IT complexity but the highest scenario complexity.

Another common issue is when a gap exists between the initial diagnosis of an issue and the actual root cause. A mature, process-driven IT service desk is best equipped to pinpoint early on if an issue may be a serious problem that could have a widespread impact on the organization.

For example, if you receive three calls about the same issue, your IT service desk should be able to quickly pinpoint that the calls are related. You don’t want to wait until the issue has spread throughout the business.

Tracking The Right Metrics

Once you’ve identified a few issues in your gap analysis, you need to find the right metrics to track as you start implementing process changes.

Almost everything associated with an IT service desk is measurable, including:

• Number of calls received per day
• Average length of call
• First-line resolution rate

Compare your numbers to industry standards, but don’t go too far. What’s most important is that your numbers match your business goals and objectives. You want to grow in a coordinated manner.

Only your team understands what the unique business goals your company is focused on. Tailoring your IT incident management to help support those overarching goals by focusing on critical systems and applications is the key to a successful business.

Since everything is so measurable, it’s tempting to go overboard when looking at metrics. While the numbers do matter, humans are at the root of IT service desk management. Use the metrics to track your progress, ensuring that process changes are actually working.

Invest In Training

Pair these process changes with the right personnel development to ensure you have the right people on each level of your service desk. Process is critical, but you need properly-trained IT professionals with the right skill sets to successfully carry out your incident management plans.

To learn more about how process improvements can improve your IT incident management, download our new eBook, “Streamlining IT Service Desk Incident Management: 3 Process Changes To Make Now.”

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