Panayiotis Christodoulou

 Objectives  About help desks and a typical help desk organization  The incident management process  The physical layout of help desk work areas  How hardware and software tools are used to manage help desk incidents  Help desk trends

Objectives  The mission of a support group and the parts of a mission statement  The steps in staffing a support position  The contents of a training program for support staff  How to manage a user support project  Which software tools help with project management tasks  The industry certifications that are available to support professionals  About professional help desk and user support associations  Ethical principles that guide the professional behavior of support workers

User support management encompasses a variety of positions. The managers of larger support groups may oversee one or more supervisors or lead workers who in turn supervise a team of support specialists. When the support staff understands the big picture it enables them to improve customer satisfaction and help the support team to be successful.

A managerial perspective also helps prepare entry-level staff to advance into positions with more responsibility and a higher salary. Support groups often develop a mission statement, which is a list of guiding principles that communicate support goals and objectives to staff, users, and management. Help desk managers often use performance statistics and measures of customer satisfaction to document and justify the value of user support services.

Performance statistics are objective summaries of information about the user support or help desk operation. Some examples of common help desk performance measures include average response time to calls (sometimes wait time), percentage of calls that were abandoned when the user hung up before support staff response (abandonment rate), average resolution time for calls that require problem solving, percentage of problems that cannot be resolved and number of problem calls currently in an unresolved status. Subjective evaluations such as a user satisfaction survey that attempts to measure how satisfied users are with the support services they have experienced can also be used to measure the performance of user support services.

User support and help desk managers face a great challenge when determining how many support staff members are needed to meet the service level’s requirements. The managers must strike a delicate balance between having too many staff, which can lead to idle employees and a poor productivity to staff ratio, and having too few staff, which can cause frustration among support staff and long wait times for users. A calculation called an Erlang unit is often used to calculate the staff needed. An Erlang is a unit of traffic (user calls in the case of support groups) processed in a given period of time. Managers may use trial and error, rely on previous experience or use a sophisticated calculator to help make staffing decisions.

Most user support positions require a combination of technical skills, business skills, and communication skills. Managers often start with a Knowledge, Skills and Abilities (KSA) assessment of the mission statement to determine the qualifications needed for a position. These qualifications spell out the level of proficiency required with hardware, operating systems and application software, technical skills, network experience and skills, Internet and Web skills, troubleshooting and problem-solving skills, communications, listening and telephone skills, working in a project team and understanding business information systems and business perspectives. From the KSAs list, a support manager can then write a position description.

From the position description, the support manager or the Human Resources Department places an advertisement in the newspaper. The search for a new staff member my not result in applicants that completely match the profile, however, managers may select the applicant that most closely matches the desired skill set. During the interview, managers may include a knowledge and skills test that measures a prospective employee’s knowledge and problem- solving ability. Another tool that can be used is a scenario question, which gives the applicants a specific problem (or set of problems) representative of the kinds of problems that user support actually encounters.

Support staff training includes both new employee orientation and ongoing training for staff to keep their knowledge and skills current. Managers will occasionally assume that support staff will simply pick up information about new products in their everyday work. If one goal of a support group mission is to provide high quality services, support staff members need time to learn how to be productive with new technology. Training for new support employees often includes orientation to the organization, payroll and employee benefit information, specific job skill training, support group policies and procedures and performance appraisal criteria and procedures. Training programs for user support employees should help keep support staff current with changes in computer technology and how those changes affect their customer base.

Support managers should also communicate with support employees about when and how job performance will be evaluated. A performance appraisal is a process to evaluate a user support employee according to established criteria.

User support work can be divided into routine operational tasks and special projects. Most of the work of a support group falls into the category of routine operational tasks. A special project, however, is a support task that does not happen regularly and that may be based on less well-defined steps and procedures. Special projects might include developing or updating computer product standards or support policies in an organization, planning and implementing a new training facility or developing end-user documentation or a user training session for a new software package.

Project management is a step-by-step work plan and process designed to reach a specific goal.  Step 1 is project definition. Early work on a project serves to define the project, including its goal(s), a tentative project calendar (beginning and ending dates, important due dates), a project budget, and the project participants. A project goal is a specific, measurable result that is the ultimate target or outcome of a project. It is important that the project goal be specific and measurable even if the budget and calendar are tentative at this stage.

 Step 2 is project planning. After a project is defined, the bulk of the project planning activities include dividing the project into specific tasks (or objectives), estimating the length of time (or duration) for each task, identifying available resources and the cost of each, and assigning resources to tasks. A project task is a specific action or objective that must be performed to meet the project goal. A project plan complies a list of all project tasks into a documentation that answers the questions: What tasks will be accomplished? Who will perform each ask? How long will each task take? What will each task cost? The project plan generally includes an assessment of the project’s risk factors, which are an analysis and assessment of the problems that can arise during the life of a project.

 Step 3 is project implementation. The implementation phase of the project is where the real work gets done. The project manager’s responsibility shifts from project planning to project coordination and support staff members work on each task or objective according to the schedule in the project plan.

 Step 4 is project monitoring. Project monitoring involves assessing the status of all project tasks to learn whether they are on target as compared with time and budget estimates. Because each task of a project seldom comes in on time and under budget, project monitoring is necessary. Project managers need to regularly evaluate each project task to determine how much work has been completed, what remains to be done, how staff or other resources should be adjusted or reassigned and what impact task changes will have on the completion date. Scope creep is the tendency for a project to grow or change in unexpected ways that increase the time frame, resources, and cost to complete the project.

 Step 5 is project termination. The final stage in a project may include communicating its completion to stakeholders, preparing a final project report, and analyzing and evaluating the performance of the project and its participants.  Project termination activities help project managers learn from mistakes of past projects and use their knowledge to improve performance on future projects.

 As projects become more complex, more resources including additional staff members, more resources, a bigger budget, a larger time frame, and also additional risk factors, a one- or two-page project plan is not sufficient.  Fortunately there are software tools, which assist with all aspects of project management. Project management software tools, however, are no substitute for careful project planning. A Gantt Chart, is a common project planning tool that shows the basic information about each task in a project as a horizontal bar on a graph.

 “What if…?” questions are often easier to answer with a project management software tool. A modified draft plan first shows a more detailed breakdown of each task into subtasks. Second, it shows that some subtasks are predecessor tasks for other tasks. A predecessor task is an activity that must be completed before another task can begin. Third, instead of one trainer being assigned to the project, as the first draft plan, a second trainer is assigned to select subtasks that can be accomplished at the same time the first trainer is working on another subtask.

 The Gantt Chart shows certain tasks in as solid black horizontal bars. These bars are the project’s critical path. A critical path is the sequence of project tasks that must be completed on time to meet the project’s completion date. The critical path can also indicate where in the process more resources will have the best impact on the project’s completion time.

 Project management software can assist with project tasks, task time duration, assignments to staff members, what-if analyses, the critical path and estimated completion time. It can also complete other important project management tasks by using features to monitor partial completion of projects tasks and periodically update the Gantt Chart. Also, it can identify project tasks that are behind schedule and where additional resources could be used effectively. This software can also aid a manager with assigning resources such as personnel, facilities, equipment and supplies. In addition, it can track overhead costs to prepare a project budget, define report formats that are alternatives to Gantt Charts (including project calendars, budget and variance reports, PERT or network diagrams), individual staff assignment s, and other project management output options.

Certification is an assessment process to measure and document employee knowledge and skills in a specialized segment of the information technology field. There are several kinds of certification in the market today including formal education that results in certificate, diploma or degree, vendor-specific product knowledge and skill certification in a specific area, such as hardware, networking, or support, and certification that measures the fitness of a support group against industry-standard criteria.

Community colleges and vocational/technical schools have offered certification for many years. This certification is usually an indication of general skills. Employers are more often interested in an applicant’s specific skills and expertise. A number of vendors now offer certificates that assess knowledge and skills in a specific area. There are also vendor neutral certifications that are more generic. Help desks and help desk staff can also be certified. Some certifications are aimed at organizations rather than individuals. Best practices are support industry procedures, tools, and methods that very successful support groups employ.

For help desk and user support specialist, some of the benefits of certification include a recognized benchmark of minimum-level job skills and experienced worker, a justification for receiving higher pay, an opportunity for promotion and career advancement because of documented knowledge and skills, a way to document for an employer efforts to keep up to date in the computer field, and a feeling of pride of accomplishment and increased job satisfaction upon passing a certification milestone.

The most common certification expected for user support and help desk positions is either MOS or A+ certification. MOS certification indicates that the support specialist has a recognized level of expertise in common Microsoft applications where A+ certification demonstrates knowledge of hardware, operating systems and troubleshooting. Individuals interested in certification have a number of options including college or vocational/technical courses, crash courses, online tutorials and self-study courses.

The skills needed to pass certification exams can be gain in a variety of venues. Many college and vocational/technical schools now match the curriculum in their courses with certification in the area covered by the course. Another option is to take a crash course. Crash courses, sometimes called boot camps, are intensive classes designed to prepare participants in a short time to take a certification exam. Other options include online tutorial courses and self study courses.

Most certifications are taken on a computer workstation. In the traditional format of a certification test, all test takers answer the same set of questions on a test that has a fixed-length sequence of questions. A new type of test, called an adaptive test, is becoming common in certification. An adaptive test asks questions selected from a test database to try to quickly estimate the test taker’s ability. The test questions are rated from easy to difficult and the adaptive test offers questions based on a mathematical estimate of skill level of the test taker based on the pattern of correct and incorrect answers.

 The Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) estimates that more than 600,000 technical support positions were open some time during the year 2000, and that more than one- third of them went unfilled. As a result of the growth of the user support field, there have been a number of professional associations formed in recent years. A professional association is a formal organization that represents the interests of a group of professionals and provides services to its members.

These associations offer a wide variety of services including books, seminars, conferences, and certifications. A professional association can also publish a code of ethical principles or conduct standards designed to guide its members’ professional behaviour