Does Your Help Desk Make the Grade?
Posted on Thu, Jan 19, 2012
By Robert J. Vernam
Periodic evaluation of your help desk by an outside source to review staffing and levels of service will prevent wasteful technology spending and ensure business alignment.
To perform a meaningful evaluation, consider these five important questions:
- How many users do you support?
This is the basic question most managers should know. It’s also the number that most people would go by. For instance, you may need X number of help desk staff for every X number of users. However, to stop at this question could be unwise as the ratio varies greatly depending on the hardware, software and services your company uses. It would also be wise to consider the technical acumen of your staff—usually the more technically savvy your workforce is, the fewer service calls you get, even though that is not always the case.
- What hardware do you support?
This is an inventory of your equipment from workstations and laptops to switches and routers. The list also includes printers, faxes, scanners, phones and any other peripheral device that your help desk supports. It also is important to know who manufactures the equipment. Hardware standardization can reduce the amount of work on your help desk as 20 Toshiba laptops are easier to support than five HP, five Dells, five Toshibas and five Acers.
- What operating systems do you support?
If you are a Windows shop, then you may need fewer people, but if you have a mix of Macs for the graphic design department, multiple Linux servers and a legacy AIX server, then you may need to have a few more staff that specialize in certain operating systems. While going with an open source solution may be cheaper up front, it could end up being more costly if you need to hire a new person to support it.
- What application software do you support?
This includes not only user applications like Microsoft Office or Adobe Acrobat, but also server based applications like SharePoint and Exchange. The more complex and diverse the applications are, the more people you will need to support them. If every user just has email and MS Office then you can probably get away with one support staff member for every 75 users, but that is rarely the case.
- Do you have an IT Ticket System?
An IT Ticket system plays an important role in evaluating your help desk staff. If properly configured, you should be able to determine many metrics such as how many tickets come in per week, what category the tickets are, what percentage of tickets each category represents and what the average resolution time is per category. All of this information can help you determine if your team is being overworked or maybe even if you’re overstaffed.
Answering these questions can help evaluate your help desk staff and prevent self-serving agendas from conflicting with organizational needs and objectives.
While something in the range of one staff member for every 50 users can be used as a guideline, it really depends on the hardware and software diversity of your business. Without a hardware and software inventory or a way to measure the metrics of your staff’s performance, you could be throwing away money at either an overstaffed department or on downtime due to insufficient coverage.
Robert J. Vernam is a DocuTech systems engineer and certified Cisco CCNA.