Problem? What Problem?

By Kevin L. McLaughlin and Jerry Kenney

We left off on our Incident Management story "Is Your Help Desk Asking for Help" with my friend Bob proclaiming, "That, my friend, is where the Problem Management Process comes in to play."

Bob was talking about a process that ensures the correct resources are doing the appropriate work and that Incidents do not keep happening repeatedly. We were discussing my global "email" Help Desk, which at the time consisted of 15 high-end contractors who were all systems administrators in various technologies.

Previously, these system administrators fielded all Incident calls directly. They received escalated Incidents from our multiple "local" Help Desks and had senior developers, programmers, and implementers calling them for support. The way we staffed our Help Desk the senior level support personnel spent about 65% of their time writing up Incident tickets, logging calls, providing status reports for ongoing Incidents, and answering the telephone; high priced clerical work. Sound familiar?

Bob told me that he had a better way to handle Incidents and Problems. Would it not make more sense if everyone who needed help called a Service Desk that had less costly resources to perform all the logging, tracking, and Incident escalation tasks? Well yes, this is an approach that could give my higher-level resources 65% percent more time to work on solving Problems. I asked Bob if he had a call center in mind for this work, and he smiled and said, "Yes, yours."