Next Topic

Previous Topic

Book Contents

Planning for Service Desk

Here are some issues to consider when planning the implementation of Service Desk:

  • Who are the users and what are their roles?
  • What resource pools should you define? Resource pools are groups of technicians allocated to different areas of specialization.
  • What is the life cycle, or workflow, of a ticket? Ticket workflows are defined using stages.
  • Should tasks be used to track assignments required to close a ticket?
  • What ticket properties are required? What values are allowed for each property? What are their default values?
  • What ticket property access permissions should be assigned, by role and by user?
  • What ticket list view preferences should be defined? Which columns should display? Conditional formatting enables you to set color shading and highlighting based on ticket creation, modification, or due date. What predefined filters should be defined?
  • What are your service goals: response time, time to resolution, etc.?
  • Will you provide more than one service level?
  • What are your ticket sources: manual creation, incoming email, monitoring, etc.
  • What are your addresses for incoming email?
  • What is your criteria for detecting duplicate monitoring alerts?
  • What automation would be beneficial for different events and conditions: ticket created, ticket changed, stage entry/exit, escalation based on elapsed time in current stage and ticket age?
  • What level of end-user communication is desired?
  • What templates would be useful for email notifications and inserting notes into the ticket history log?
  • What are your knowledge base requirements?
  • What reporting and metrics are desired?
  • Are you tracking time spent on tickets for billing purposes?
  • At what point should you activate the creation of Service Desk tickets from alarms instead of Ticketing tickets.