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Consolidating Service Desk and Desktop Support. Your thoughts, please?

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I’m thinking of moving my Desktop Support team into a Service Desk role. This is necessitated by the cost pressures that I’m currently feeling and I need to reduce my costs ASAP. And also to make full use of my vendor’s allocated resources because currently I think there are a lot of underutilized resources within both areas. Both areas are outsourced to the same vendor.
Main drivers:
– Cost reduction
– Full utilization of the resources
– Improved first time resolution of incidents
– Reduced talk time with the users.

I know it is not what ITIL recommends, but I’m feeling some serious cost pressures at the moment.
Please share your thought.

– MaM

Topic

Clarifications

In reply to Consolidating Service Desk and Desktop Support. Your thoughts, please?

Clarifications

Desktop Support team VS. Service Desk

In reply to Consolidating Service Desk and Desktop Support. Your thoughts, please?

These things are arbitrary terms that could mean the same thing… What are you doing?

Desktop Support team VS. Service Desk

In reply to Consolidating Service Desk and Desktop Support. Your thoughts, please?

Hi, As per ITIL Service desk is the function and Incident management, request fulfilment, even management , problem management etc.. are the processes. So it is very possible to train desktop support guys on ITIL and then assign them to service desk to reduce overall operational cost. But before we jump to the conclusion I need following details to let you know the best way to implement this idea.
1. Business of your organisation and role of IT
2. Brief of activities performed by Desktop support team
3. Kind of tool that you are using for IT service management
We can implement a solution which will reduce the cost by 30-40%.

Great Idea!!!

In reply to Consolidating Service Desk and Desktop Support. Your thoughts, please?

MaM,

I think it’s a great move to merge your desktop support. Basically both would be involved in incident management, and how they do it is up to your strategy.

Maybe you can have half your people rotate into a service desk role on a rota basis. This way, desktop support employees perform both roles, and you can cut the monotony associated with it.

I had tried a similar experiment in one of my previous employments, and it had paid off rich dividends.

If you are further planning on cutting the costs, you can set up an online ticket system where users raise tickets by themselves, this will definitely increase efficiency – another improvement that I have tried and came out successfully. Let me know if you need further assistance.

Evaluate activities

In reply to Consolidating Service Desk and Desktop Support. Your thoughts, please?

MaM,

I would suggest to you evaluate the difference between activities performed by the service desk & the desktop support team. Service desk guys are good at communication, efficiently handling customers, coordination and follow up. On the other hand, technical guys might not be so skill on these qualities instead would be good at troubleshooting technical issues.
If you are trying to combine these teams, cross functional training would be required. Also, you have to live with some degraded quality on service desk and also on the technical front.
As I said earlier, it depends on the how much difference is there in the skill of these teams. Wider the difference, more difficult to merge.
If L2 team is comprised on guys with technical certifications like MCSE etc. it would be difficult. Also, there would be team motivational challenges when technicians are asked to do service desk work.
Reduction in cost could be done with adopting technology that can help standardization. L2 should continuously work on developing knowledge base and there should be continues process of moving activities from L2 to L1.

[Author]

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