A friend was telling me recently about his company’s general frustration with their IT support provider. (I’d love to quote for a better service but they are unfortunately tied in to a long contract with this provider).
Vicious circle
Despite the fact that the support techs involved are hard working, competent guys with great customer service skills, the client company’s productivity was suffering and frustration levels were rising.
The support people did not seem to value the users’ time and thought nothing of spending several hours on a user’s PC working through an issue. Persistence is often laudable but in this case the user was held back from her work for half a day leading to a knock on effect on productivity throughout the company. This kind of cure often causes more pain than the original problem.
Priorities were decided by a combination of who-shouts-loudest and first-in-first-out. The same faults occurred time and again and lessons learned by one tech are not shared with others.
The support techs’ hard work, dedication and technical skill were simply not enough to deliver the productivity gains expectated from the company’s investment in up to date IT systems. Users and IT provider are caught in a vicious circle where the users’ level of frustration continues to escalate.
Structure
In my opinion things will not improve at this company unless some structure is applied to the support effort, such as the ITIL framework for instance. Some may dismiss ITIL as being over-bureaucratic, designed by civil servants with too much time on their hands or assume it is a job creation scheme created by and for the IT industry.
Our own use of ITIL at ISN has provided us with a toolkit of best practice which deliver real benefits which result in happier users long term. Adopting just a few ITIL best-practice approaches would unglue the wheels and increase productivity for my friend’s company and result in bottom line savings.
Just to pluck a few examples out of the air:
- Having senior engineers dedicated to “problem management” would address the underlying causes of common faults and prevent them recurring
- Agreeing a method with management for “incident prioritisation” would reduce impact on the company’s core activities
- Developing a searchable knowledgebase from information logged regarding problem resolution would shorten fix times
The fact is that most office workers can’t get their job done without reliable IT systems. With the pace of modern working life, any hold up wastes time and money and increases stress levels for end user and IT staff alike. Adoption of ITIL does not have to be all-or-nothing; a company can choose the elements that fit its business requirements and culture.