Getting a grip on your IT service desk

IT operations in school are vast and diverse, so can sometimes feel overwhelming to manage. But they can easily be broken down into ten areas of focus, these ten areas that make up the IT operation in your school are:

● Service desk.

● Incident management.

● Problem management.

● Change management.

● Configuration management.

● Release management.

● Availability and capacity management.

● Service level management.

● Service continuity management.

● Financial management.

I’m going to focus on the first operational area which is the service desk. This is the bread and butter of any IT support team – whether that is in-house or managed through a third party. This is also the route by which most of your staff and students experience your IT support. For the sake of your users - and your IT support team - you should have one central place where all requests are recorded.

The most important thing a service desk introduces is accountability - not just in relation to the IT support team to deal with things, but also for the users to make sure they are helping the IT support team by providing all the necessary information. The service desk can be as simple as an exercise book in the staff room, or a shared spreadsheet, right through to a complex dedicated system. What does each type offer, and what are the drawbacks?

● Paper-based – this is by far the most straight forward; it’s simple to set up and maintain, and everyone can access it easily, but this approach can make it difficult for the IT support team to prioritise, produce reports and track calls.

● Simple spreadsheet or database – this can provide a bit more functionality but it does take a bit more time to set up and can also be prone to human error as people are able to overwrite existing entries by accident making it less useful as an accountability tool.

● Dedicated service desk systems - there are plenty of these systems to choose from –including some free options. They take a lot more time to set up - and some of the more expensive systems may be cost-prohibitive – but they can help an IT support team be more efficient and spend more time working and less time tracking jobs. The overview that can be provided to SLT is also much greater in these types of systems, allowing the leadership team the option of proactively introducing both challenge and support when needed.

Whichever option you go for you it must collect information about the incident or request, the impact the problem is having on users (to help understand the priority the task needs to be given), any additional details that are relevant and somewhere for the IT support team to record how and when it was resolved.

This last bit of information is crucial in both helping to build a knowledge base which gives the team a starting point should the same thing happen again, identifying when something may need to be escalated to the problem management operational area - for example, it is isolated in itself but there may be many instances of the same things happening that would be better treated together rather than in isolation.

For a lot more information about implementing a service desk – take a look at the EdFITS framework on EdTech Centralhttps://edtechcentral.uk/framework/