Configuration Management is all about implementing the right tools and processes to help your company operate more efficiently. It's no surprise that CM experts often become the overall "process" guru in any organization. That's a good thing. Helping your company operate more efficiently is just one of the great ways that a CM'er adds value. It's also a great way to get yourself on-track for a promotion. Configuration Management often requires some basic skills in setting up a Help Desk function. I have always insisted on calling my group, "Release Management Services" to emphasize the Service based role that must be implicit in any successful CM function. So what if you were to be given the job of setting up the whole Help Desk function. Would you know where to start? Read on and you will!
Setting up a Service Desk
There is a lot involved with setting up an efficient Help Desk function. It is often hard to tell where you should even start. I have been taking a deep dive on learning the ITIL Service Desk described in the ITIL v3 framework developed by the ITSMF (http://www.itsmfi.org). Learning from standards and frameworks means that you do not have to reinvent the best practices that others have already learned and fine-tuned from many years of experience.
For ITIL v3, the Service Desk consists of functions to handle Events, Incidents and Problems. Events are things which occur in your environment that should be tracked. Events may be routine such as the startup and shutdown of a system or potential service interruptions such as a disk drive exceeding it quota and storage capacity. Incidents are things which occur that have the potential to impact normal service. The Service Desk personnel may have standing procedures that enable them to handle Events and assist the customer with handling any Incidents which may occur. Problems typically require more investigation or what ITIL calls "root cause analysis". Problems may need to be escalated in order to achieve a resolution and satisfactory restoration of service.
Usually a Service Desk also handles Access requests such as resetting passwords. Service Requests such as a new machine or product installation are typically also handled by the Service Desk. I am knee-deep in learning this framework for a project that I am working on and extremely impressed with the wisdom that I see in the ITIL v3 framework. There is certainly no reason to start from scratch when you have such great best practices to choose from when building your own Help Desk solution.
Make sure you drop me a line and tell me how your own Help Desk design is working!
Bob Aiello is the Editor-in-Chief for CM Crossroads and an independent consultant specializing in Software Process Improvement including Software Configuration and Release Management. Mr. Aiello has over 25 years experience as a technical manager in several top NYC Financial Services firms where he had had company-wide responsibility for CM, often providing hands-on technical support for enterprise Source Code Management tools, SOX/Cobit compliance, build engineering, continuous integration and automated application deployment. Bob is a long standing member of the Steering Committee of the NYC Software Process Improvement Network (CitySPIN), where he serves as the chair of the CM SIG. Mr. Aiello holds a Masters in Industrial Psychology from NYU and a B.S. in Computer Science and Math from Hofstra University. You may contact Mr. Aiello at raiello@acm.org or link with him at http://www.linkedin.com/in/bobaiello.
Configuration Management is all about implementing the right tools and processes to help your company operate more efficiently. It's no surprise that CM experts often become the overall "process" guru in any organization. That's a good thing. Helping your company operate more efficiently is just one of the great ways that a CM'er adds value. It's also a great way to get yourself on-track for a promotion. Configuration Management often requires some basic skills in setting up a Help Desk function. I have always insisted on calling my group, "Release Management Services" to emphasize the Service based role that must be implicit in any successful CM function. So what if you were to be given the job of setting up the whole Help Desk function. Would you know where to start? Read on and you will!
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