Category Archives: Problem Management

WHAT IS A HELPDESK?

OK, to start with it’s not a desk that helps people! A help desk is a team of individuals (generally support staff) that provide solutions and resolutions to customers experiencing problems. Generally working at the 1st tier of the support model they are responsible for Incident reporting and resolution vs. Problem Management (I shall discuss those terms in greater depth below).


What is an Incident?
Simply put, an Incident is anything related to customer contact (Incidents are also reported by automatic means via monitoring tools and I will discuss those types of incidents in greater depth in later posts). Incidents related to customers can be anything really – Information requests, Account Updates, Issue reporting are all examples of Incidents. Incidents can also be reported through a variety of different methods – this could include the phone (probably the most common), email (a close 2nd) and even chat. As mentioned previously, automated monitoring tools can also generate incidents.


All of these different Incidents coming from/through different sources would get routed to your Incident Management tool. For smaller teams, this could be something as simple as a spreadsheet but in larger organizations either in-house customer-built applications or enterprise level tools prevail.



Incident Management (in a nutshell)
Your helpdesk is responsible for reviewing the information in each of these incidents and checking if there is an appropriate solution already available to the customer. For those instances for example where the customer wishes to update their Account Information, the helpdesk would look at the Incident, obtain the correct new information (& assuming that all appropriate security questions had been reviewed) log into the customers account and update the information. Once the information had been updated, they would inform the customer and then close the Incident. This is probably one of the simpler examples of an Incident from start to finish.


If the customer is reporting a problem or an issue, the Helpdesk staff are responsible for updating the Incident with all the relevant details as supplied by the customer. If the customer’s issue matches a known fix they are able to inform or supply that fix to the customer, however, if that is not the case they would need to escalate the issue to the Problem Management team. The simplest way to think of the Incident Management (Helpdesk/Tier1) team and the issues they resolve is that if a “band-aid” exists they can apply it. If more drastic attention is required they will need to call the Doctor!



Problem Management
Problem Management is where the interesting work really happens. Incident Management due to its repetitive nature can get tedious and is definitely a drain on the more skilled staff in your organization … if you have people like that, think about moving them into Problem Management if you have such a team or create one if you don’t! Problem Management is more in-depth. It’s where more often than not a single Problem is the cause of multiple Incident’s from multiple customers … as such you want your best people at this level. Generally, you would consider this Tier 2 or Tier 3 from an escalation and staffing perspective and dependent on your product or service you would have some very technically oriented people there. Their goal is not to just provide a band-aid, but rather to find out why the problem happened in the first place and fix it. Ideally, they should be looking at ways to fix it in such a way as to ensure that it doesn’t happen again!!



KPI’s
Now each of these teams would have different metrics in place. Obviously, your Tier1 team (Incident Management/Customer Service/Helpdesk) needs to get back to the customer in a timely manner. Their goal as already mentioned is to fix it, fix it fast and move on. A band-aid will not always reattach the finger though, so it’s up to the Tier2 team to ensure that the surgery goes smoothly which obviously takes a lot more time as you don’t want the surgeon doing a shoddy job!




Response Time – So with that analogy in mind … you want to have an aggressive goal set for your Helpdesk – try to work with the 80/20 rule … 80% of incidents responded to in 20 seconds (If you have the resources, otherwise maybe 20 minutes? Or 20 hours (that’s less than 1 day so might still be good – especially if you’re doing email support)? Or 20 days ß well that’s probably not really worthwhile) but hopefully you get the point? You want to set a specific goal for measuring how quickly your customers are getting a response.



Resolve Time – notice that I have separated these out. As much as you’d like to be able to resolve 100% of issues at that first contact, it’s not always going to be possible. However, you can have another measurement in place that tracks this which is the Resolve Time (sometimes called MTTR (Mean Time to Repair)). The Goal here is also to get that band-aid on as quickly as possible so you need to ensure that your Incident Management system has some sort of a knowledge base which helps your staff find the solution to commonly placed issues/questions. If they have the answer every time, then a 100% resolution at 1st contact is achievable! If not, however … it gets a bit more complicated because all of a sudden your Incident Management team becomes the customer and the team they go to is the Problem Management team. Guess what? They have a different measurement for Response Time and Resolve Time too!


Problem Management Response Time – now as previously mentioned these are generally your more senior staff and as much as you’d like them to be available 24/7 unless you have an extremely large organization this is probably fairly unlikely. So you are going to have built or determined some relevant response times based on their availability. In addition, as these escalated issues are generally issues that cannot easily be resolved, your resolution time is going to be extended also. Pick some appropriate intervals that meet your customers SLAs. Your main goal for this team (in addition to resolving the problem of course) is communication, communication, communication!!! They must inform your customer-facing agents what the issue is, what they are doing to resolve it and when they expect to have it resolved. If they cannot provide an estimated resolution time, they MUST provide your Tier1 team with an estimated update time.

The Difference Between Incident Managment and Problem Management

Incident Management and Problem Management are both key components of the ITIL service model and have been defined and created in an effort to provide a better and more streamlined service to consumers.

ITIL itself stands for the – Information Technology Infrastructure Library – and comprises of the following books:

  • ITIL Service Strategy 
  • ITIL Service Design 
  • ITIL Service Transition 
  • ITIL Service Operation 
  • ITIL Continual Service Improvement
Incident Management and Problem Management are both elements of the fourth volume – ITIL Service Operation, which tries to define the best practice for dealing with interruptions to a customers service.

What is an Incident?

An incident is a single – unique – issue impacting one specific customer and their service. While there can be many similar incidents impacting multiple customers, each of them are in their fashion unique and need to be logged and treated as such.

An example of an incident is you losing your home Internet connection. While the underlying root cause could be related to a fiber cut impacting hundreds of houses, your individual issue is one specific incident as it is unique to you. 

What is the objective of the Incident Management team?

The Incident Management team is the group responsible for dealing with your issue. Now they could be called by a variety of different names – Helpdesk, Service Desk, Technical Support Team etc… – their primary role is to get your service restored in as timely a manner as possible. They are basically there to put a “band-aid” on your problem and not necessarily resolve the root cause.

How are Incidents Tracked?

Incidents are tracked and responded to through a variety of different automated and manual tools. The ideal function of the Incident Management team is to resolve the issue before it has an impact on your business/life and they track these issues through a variety of different alarms and monitoring tools.

The worst type of reporting is one in which a manual report is needed. If a customer has been impacted, then in some fashion they have already failed in one of their primary roles!

What is a problem?

In the context of Incident Management, a Problem is one that comprises multiple incidents. If you take into account my previous example of an Internet failure at your home, the problem, in this case, would be the actual fiber cut which is the root cause of the issue.

As such, this “problem” would have multiple incidents attached to it.

What is Problem Management?

In contrast to Incident Management, Problem Management is a lot more than just slapping a band-aid on an Incident. With Problem Management the underlying root cause of an issue must be discovered and steps are taken to ensure that similar issues do not occur in the future. Problem Management is a significantly more involved process and takes quite a bit more time and resources to achieve correctly.