Taming the Help Desk

By Geoffrey Sperl

In this study Geoffrey Sperl discusses how he moved from a computer geek to the manager of a team of people at the Computer & Information Technology Help Desk at Wayne State University.

“Plenty of universities and colleges experience the “geek” becoming the manager, unfortunately he or she has usually not been given any training to start with – just staff, a budget, and a handful of directives”.

The first point made is dress attire, the move from “geek” to “manager” meant changing personal styles and tastes.  Wearing a T-shirt and jeans with an unshaven face is not acceptable in such a high position. A person who dresses like this may be just as intelligent as a person in a suit but as humans we do judge a book by its cover.  

Sperl’s suggestions are altered depending on the situation or workplace. For example, if you are in a relaxed workplace, a total wardrobe revamp is not necessary. Polo style shirts come in numerous colours and styles and would be acceptable in this situation. If it is a less relaxed workplace, formal attire is appropriate.

Further to appearance, taming the help desk involves; planning, training, leading and reviewing. Being in control of your helpdesk is important and following these steps will help you become a good manager.

Personally I disagree with the suggestions of dress options, if you are in a managerial role you should dress formally as you will be judged by your work peers and your staff will respect you.

Service Management in Operations

By Sue Conger, MaryAnne Winniford and Lisa Erickson-Harris

Over recent years many frameworks have been introduced to IT organizations, these frameworks are designed to help develop specific service processes for their organizations. Although frameworks such as; ITIL, COBIT and CMMI were designed to help IT organizations, the results of this research survey show that there is significant confusion from IT managers.

There were some interesting results discovered from this survey. One that was particularly interesting to me were that out of 364 individuals asked whether they practiced service management only 45% of companies were using service management. When respondents not utilizing service management were asked to describe the barriers to using service management in their organization, 61% said that there was a need for more information about service management.

This article shows that there are a large number of businesses not using a service management framework. Results show that this is because there is great conceptual confusion. This could be improved with clearer terminology, better definitions and a broader dissemination of framework information. I think that using a service management framework in an organization, especially an IT organization is largely beneficial. So much can go wrong in an IT organization and if there are processes and ways out there to prevent disaster then they should be utilized. 

Mastering IT Change Management Step Two: Moving from Ignorant anarchy to Informed Anarchy

By Ken Dietel

This study examines an IT support organization of approximately 300 people maintaining over 100 systems, implementing 60-75 changes per month. Ken Dietel describes their current management system as; "Ignorant Anarchy". This article focuses on addressing issues when implementing change in an organization and moving the organization from an "Ignorant Anarchy" to an "Informed Anarchy".

Currently the organization was having regular problems such as; multiple users ringing the help desk to report problems that the help desk analysts would research but find no previous record or reasons why the system would be performing this way. The system developers would then report that a change had been implemented and the system was expected to be working this way. This shows that people from the same organization are working interdependently of each other. This can and is causing huge issues.

Change Management processes were implemented to change the overall process flow. "This started with a change request being submitted, then approved, reviewed, announced and finally implemented". This made a huge difference to the overall process as managers were used to having no standard at all.

Through the process of trying to change the state of the organization it was learned that the change review meetings were not effective, this is because there were just too many participants to understand the implications of the requested changes. From this a Core Change Team was defined.

It was hard to get people to change their habits but the process of changing from ignorant anarchy to "Informed Anarchy" was successful.

If there is a need or opportunity for improvement in how an organization can achieve greater work, they should attempt it. This article proves that improvement can be made to a whole organizations structure and production by changing the way things are done.

~Luisa Zigliani