10 reasons IT support teams struggle

An IT Service Desk and other support teams usually work in a natural way that lacks sufficient structure. Here's 10 reasons for this being undesirable:

1. While support teams generally respond quite quickly to new service tickets, if the ticket then needs to remain open, it tends to dwindle and age, meaning it might never reach a satisfactory conclusion.

2. When a service recipient updates their ticket, usually by email, this might not be noticed and acted upon, meaning the recipient is ignored and service might fail to be provided at all.

3. Reliance is primarily on individuals, not teams but collective, collaborative working has many advantages.

4. Personal ticket queues aren't managed during periods of leave.

5. Support teams use either generic ticket queues, or Dashboards that don't greatly assist workload prioritisation.

6. Managers lack useful workload overview, making it difficult to direct and control.

7. Managers lack work activity insight, making it difficult to identify where things should have been done differently and leaving team members working largely independently.

8. It's a steep learning curve for many new Service Desk staff, so frequent mistakes are made.

9. Impossibility in accurately excluding "on-hold" periods, so SLA target time is unrealistically long and the target regularly breaches.

10. Open ticket volume is too high and often rising.

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This is because the three P's of optimal service delivery haven't been found. These are:

1. Enhanced prioritisation.

2. Smart workload presentation.

3. Motivation through holistic personal performance management.

There's a fourth element that will also make a big difference to how service is provided. That is, teamwork.

The three P's and teamwork are outputs of the Service Focus Framework, bringing efficiency and control to IT support.