It's All About Communication

The Service Desk can provide a lot of value to both business users and IT. It is easy, however, to set it up for failure. All you need to do is stop communicating. Resolving incidents is not enough if there is no supplementary information to go with it. How often have you seen a case closed with remarks like "done", "solved" or "all good now"? Does it tell you anything? It does not tell anything to the Service Desk either.


Talk to the Team

The key things that make up the success of the Service Desks are:
I would like to focus on information exchange this time. First of all, the team needs to communicate among themselves. If one team member resolves a new type of incident, you want the rest of the team to know about it and to be able to apply this solution. You need to facilitate it any way you can. Some ideas include:
  • starting a wiki or other web-based tool,
  • using a built-in knowledge management feature of your ITSM tool,
  • putting up a board on the wall,
  • having daily stand-up meetings of not more than 15 minutes,
  • having the team seated close to each other.
Solved... How?

The Service Desk needs to tune in to information provided by other teams. But first, those teams need to provide such information. There are various ways of doing it, but it is good to start small and get a quick win. Make sure when you assign a case to another team, they get back to you with information of what was the incident about and how they solved it. Even a brief explanation of 1-2 sentences is better than nothing. Everyone can do it, no matter how busy he or she is.

Keep Information Coming

The next step is to ensure that the Service Desk is fed with supplemental information from throughout the IT department. Let them know what changes are going live soon. If a new system is about to be launched, the Service Desk team should already have training invitations in their calendars. If you have come up with an excellent, yet simple solution to some of the incidents you got from the Service Desk -- pass it on. All sides will benefit.

What challenges have you encountered with communication within your IT department?

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