Top Five Behaviors of Successful IT Departments€¦ · PLAN EXECUTE 04 05 MAINTAIN A CYCLE FOR...

Top Five Behaviors of Successful IT Departments

INTRODUCTION

Time over personnel is always a challenge for IT departments. Limited time and scope of resources, plus last minute tasks, can erode your efforts to focus on the bigger picture. Too often, you’re expected to do more with less resources, all while maintaining your same level of service and tackling everything on your to-do list. By arming yourself with the right information, you can make better decisions going forward to protect your valuable, and limited, resources, and ensure that you’re making the most out of your organization’s funding.

However, if you’re still only addressing the break/fix tasks that come up during the day instead of focusing on proactive work (which actually saves money in the long run by planning for upcoming needs and replacements in advance), you won’t be able to effectively run your department or collect data that can help you preserve your resources. By focusing only on last minute assignments without prioritizing what’s most important, you can’t think about the larger, long-term projects that will be the most beneficial to your organization.

With over a decade of working hand in hand with our clients’ help desk and IT operations, we have created strategies that will help you not only improve your day to day workflow but actually allow you to look ahead at proactive, cost-saving projects. These guidelines truly allow you to do more with less by making valuable alterations to your planning processes, including how to assess the effectiveness of you and your team’s daily operations, prioritize based on most urgent needs, and execute in a timely fashion to maintain availability and productivity.

DOING MORE

On average, many organizations only have one IT technician per 100 employees, and in the public sector, such as schools or local government organizations, we know this ratio can

be even higher. IT departments in the public sector have an even greater challenge as your organization faces unique obstacles, often as the result of funding limitations and fewer resources. However, it’s still possible to be a highly effective department with clear data on your current workflow management, state of your assets, and your overall effectiveness as a team. This data is especially useful when it comes time to present budget information for upcoming fiscal years by giving you accurate and detailed information.

But, like we said before, you can’t begin to project accurately in the future if you’re still stuck doing day-to-day reactive work. With all of the tickets and requests that you address during the day – not to mention all the last minute tasks that seem to pile up even quicker – the last thing you need is more work. That’s why best practices for long-term success work essentially hand-in-hand with your help desk solution and, with the right execution, will actually free up more of your day by eliminating the majority of reactive work.

When you do more, you’re not taking on more work; you’re prioritizing the things that matter most. It may sound like a large task to take on, but it’s doable (and effective) with just five steps – or as we like to call it, the APPEM framework.

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ASSESS01

02PRIORITIZE

03PLAN

EXECUTE0405

MAINTAIN

A CYCLE FOR SUCCESS

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1. ASSESS

The first step of the APPEM model is to assess what you currently have. This includes everything from hardware to software as well as your current method of data collection (if you currently collect data at all – if you don’t, you should!). Some important information you want to make sure you have includes:

Once you assess what you have, you can begin to see opportunities for improvement. For example: the number of licenses you have can also be an opportunity for you to audit license use and see if you’re over the allotted amount or not using all of the licenses available to you, allowing you to save money. For end users, you should look at who frequently sends in help desk requests on items that may not require technician intervention, which could highlight opportunities for training. In addition, visibility into which devices have the most tickets can allow your department to make data-driven decisions around when it’s more cost effective to replace equipment or technology rather than continue repairs on it.

When you’re in the assessment stage, you want to make sure that the insights you gain lead to actionable goals. What items are urgent, i.e. things that are broken or must be replaced? What are the things that are most important to your long-term goals, such as more proactive maintenance on devices or how to decrease end user requests? These are the things that will inform you in the next stage, and through your assessment, you’ll have valuable metrics and data.

• Age of devices• Work order history on devices• Location of devices• Type of devices (i.e. servers, tablets, laptops, printers, etc.)• Users• Status of devices

• Number of licenses• Versions of software on di�erent devices• What software is on each device• Location by device• Vulnerability/security

• User-submitted tasks and tickets• Permissions based on job title• Total cost of ownership

SOFTWARE

END USERS

HARDWARE/DEVICES


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Some other common categories for emphasis include:

• Budget/replacements

• Training opportunities

• BYOD and 1:1 initiatives

• Security

• Long term projects

• Reducing end-user service requests

Once you've assessed your current state you should have a clear idea of what and how you need to prioritize.

2. PRIORITIZE

As an IT professional, it can feel like your day to day work often involves putting out fires instead of focusing on the bigger picture. With so many things going on, and so few resources to do it, you can’t plan for long-term projects. Rather than hoping that you’ll someday hire more technicians, you can actually do more with less now if you prioritize correctly, which is exactly why prioritization directly follows the assessment of your current state.

This stage helps you discover the tasks that you can do every day to support the goals of your organization. In the Assess step, you identified the urgent and important items, so these are the tasks that will have the highest priority. Most likely, some of the common themes will have to do with saving your organization time and resources. For the longer term goals that you’ve chosen, you can begin to identify the tasks you can accomplish in your daily work to support them.

If your organization wants to make mobility or online learning a priority, for example, you can begin looking into devices that are useful for your employees, faculty or students, and address any bandwidth or connectivity issues to ensure that your network is set up to handle more devices. You can also have more than one objective; this step is designed to be

adaptive to whatever your needs are.

At the same time, anything that may impede the completion of these objectives can be identified. If, say, you find that you get multiple requests for password resets, you can begin to see that you have an opportunity for either automation or a knowledge base that can take end users through questions and troubleshooting tips to reduce simple requests. Whatever these tasks may be, you want to reduce the number of end user requests to allow time for large-scale projects while still adhering to your service-level agreements (SLAs) and keeping your end users happy. While it’s not possible to totally eliminate them, you can begin to strategize beyond only the short term and reactive requests, tickets and incidents by incorporating proactive work.

By proactively maintaining equipment, devices, software and other assets, you can actually prevent breaks before they start. You’ll free up your time in the future to continue to work on other projects and also save your organization and department budget dollars that may have been used to replace assets rather than extending the life of them through proactive and preventive work.

This stage should provide you with clear, actionable goals that you can make plans for, which is why prioritization and planning go hand in hand.

Do more with less resources by prioritizing the things that matter most


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3. PLAN

Once you have your priorities set, it’s time to make a plan. This could mean upgrading your help desk solution (or adopting one if you have yet to) or simply making sure your daily priorities fit in with your long-term plan for your department. One of the benefits of a good help desk solution, for example, is that you’ll be able to streamline request workflows using the tools built into the system.

Through proper assessment and prioritization, you’ve been able to identify the tasks that take up your day and order them by level of importance. At this stage, you can make a plan to both focus on those high priority projects while figuring out a game plan to minimize the tasks that distract from your goals. In order to do this, look to your help desk solution to see what tools they have that can both run offense by addressing items before they become problems and run defense against distractions during the day.

Such tools include:

Build automated alerts into your system to keep your technicians on track with reminders. In addition, you can also set up alerts if a warranty or license is about to expire, a software needs an update, and more. You can also create an alert if someone downloads software onto their work device or updates to a new version. Alerts are the best way to build a proactive IT team!

A FAQ page is an excellent way to catch some of your most commonly asked (and simple) questions, particularly those that users can solve on their own.

This is where you can put best practices that are both outward (for employees in all departments to read) and/or inward facing (only technicians can read). Such examples include articles on commonly asked questions that can be suggested when a user first accesses the help desk portal, or articles for technicians on best practices for solving specific assignments.

A questionnaire is an automated set of questions that guides a user to their solution without technician interference. A user can answer a set of questions pertaining to their topic, and depending on their responses they may receive an automated answer based on the solutions to previous help desk requests.

Instead of having to train individual users, take a look at your commonly asked questions and see if there’s an opportunity for a training session that you can begin to o�er for new hires. You’ll be able to dictate when you teach instead of waiting for these questions to resurface.

Depending on your organization, both users and technicians can have the option to set a priority level on a task. For example: A broken device is more serious than a password reset because it hinders productivity of your end-users and requires technician intervention.

Routing allows your department to automatically route tickets and requests based on specified conditions, such as technician skillset or proximity of technician to their sites. This reduces time to resolution for a ticket, keeping end users happy and productive.

ALERTS

FAQ

KNOWLEDGE BASE

QUESTIONNAIRE

TRAININGOPPORTUNITIES

TICKET PRIORITYLEVELS

AUTOMATEDROUTING RULES


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You’ll notice that many of these items, the knowledge base and questionnaire in particular, act like another staff member or technician who runs defense against unnecessary tickets that take up your day. By proactively answering the questions you receive the most that don’t require a technician’s help, you can make the most of your resources.

Remember, your most valuable resource is manpower, and any strategies you adopt should help you optimize it. Think of this methodology as an extra person who works with your help desk solution who you hire to help you eliminate problem tasks, set your priorities, and make you proactive instead of reactive (without actually hiring anyone new).

Now that you have a plan for defense, it’s time to figure out how you put your plan into motion. To ensure that your priorities are in line with the objectives that make the most impact, ask yourself:

• Do the tasks I have prioritized support the objectives every day?

• Is each task or project defined with a clear, actionable goal?

• Do my daily plans support my long-term, “grand” plan for my department?

Take the data you’ve collected into account, as well. The total cost of ownership (TCO) that you discovered in your Assess stage, for example, is particularly valuable here. Remember, there’s a difference between price and cost. With TCO information, including repair spend for particular items, you can create a plan to go to supervisors and show them that it’s worth it to invest more money upfront with assets that may have a higher price tag, but a lower cost over the life of the asset.

Of course, the biggest challenge that IT departments face is allocating resources to each priority. This is where

prioritization can come back into play, as you should only focus on those most important tasks rather than strain your resources to try and address everything at once.

4. EXECUTE

Now you’ve prioritized and your plans are set. All that’s left to do is execute by solving real issues and letting the tools you’ve set up in your help desk solution run both offense and defense, blocking you from unnecessary drains on your workday. The alerts you set up to let you know about upcoming needs and items to address can also be used to remind your staff of upcoming due dates and tasks.

During this step in the process, you may experience growing pains. Some of them may be constructive and bring to light further weaknesses that you can correct, while others may be a teaching moment for you to share a new process with the organization that, in the end, will further streamline workflows. For instance, end users can sometimes view going through a questionnaire as time-consuming, but it will actually help them arrive to their answers faster and reduce future requests they have about the same issue.

THREE FOCUS QUESTIONS

1. Do the tasks I have prioritized support the objectives every day?

2. Is each task or project defined with a clear, actionable goal?

3. Do my daily plans support my long-term, “grand” plan for my department?


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At this stage, collecting data is also crucial. By tracking your progress, you can see how effective your plans are at reducing reactive work, last minute requests, and other drains on your workday. Having data also helps you execute your projects. Without data and work history, you don’t know how long tasks should take to complete and, therefore, cannot allocate appropriate time or resources to projects.

Furthermore, this data can help inform you if there are other issues with a ticket, for example, if it's taking far longer to close than normal. If you simply assume something will take a certain amount of time without historical data to back up that assumption, execution breaks down and your timelines aren’t met. When you are evaluating a help desk solution, software that provides data, dashboards and reports on this information is critical to help you execute efficiently while continuing to assess as you execute your plans and priorities.

5. MAINTAIN

In order to maintain the process as you intended, you need to make sure that you’re still balancing reactive and proactive work with your projects. This includes using the data that you’ve accumulated to make better decisions for the future that will allow you to maintain your level of service while continuing to minimize tasks that aren’t beneficial to objectives.

Whatever data you choose to utilize, metrics you collect from your day to day work (from time to close to tickets per employee to even identifying problem devices) will empower you to make stronger decisions to management based on your insights.

Remember, you have the expertise to make the best recommendations for your organization’s technology, and having reports based on data will make the difference between an opinion and a fact. You’ll be able to explain

difficult-to-understand technical issues as well as budgetary needs to any department member or administrator with the power of numbers. As you maintain, you’ll begin the cycle again, continuously improving upon your success and raising the bar.

CONTINUOUSLY IMPROVING FOR THE FUTURE

The APPEM framework, our model of success, should be a cyclical process that you can return to. When something fails, you can pinpoint where in the process it broke. More importantly, these steps provide you with standards for the data you collect so that you can create reports that prove the worth of your department, highlight cost savings opportunities and eliminate the tasks that undermine your productivity. By using this data, you’ll create a feedback loop that helps gives management visibility and gives your personnel actionable goals. With all of the data you collect, you’ll be able to make accurate and informed decisions about allocating your resources to maximize manpower and efficiency- and get the most out of your budget.

Without the right help desk solution to support your APPEM guidelines, you won’t have a sustainable plan for success, let alone prepare yourselves for the one constant -- change. The platform that you choose should make your work life easier, not make it more complicated. By automating and streamlining your help desk process, your department will have more time to focus on larger, long-term projects that you’ve struggled to complete whether that be an email migration, addressing bandwidth issues, or evaluating new devices and software needed for your organization. Help DeskTM by Dude Solutions has the right tools to run defense against reactive tasks while empowering technicians with data and information through reports, saving both time and money.


866.455.3833 | [email protected] | dudesolutions.com

Help Desk allows for automated assignments to the right personnel based on work order type and other variables, plus:

• Tracking staff labor costs and time to completion in real time

• Email updates to users so that they aren’t left wondering about their tickets

• Email to ticket functionality to increase the efficiency of request submissions and increase customer satisfaction

• Parent to child ticket relationships to better track and associate tickets related to the same asset or project

With our help desk management solutions, you’ll have detailed information about each of your technology assets via the web so it’s accessible whenever and wherever you need it. Our help desk software helps maximize your effectiveness so you can get back to what you do best: Helping people.

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About Dude SolutionsDude Solutions, parent company of SchoolDude, FacilityDude and TheWorxHub, is a leading software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider of operations management solutions to education, government, healthcare, manufacturing and membership-based organizations. The company combines innovative technology with operational insight to transform the places people learn, live, heal, work, and play. Today, more than 9,000 organizations are using Dude Solutions’ award-winning software for facilities, energy, safety, IT and a growing suite of related enterprise applications to increase efficiencies, improve service and save money. For more information, please visit our website.


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