Help Desk Consolidation

Project Background:

Several independent divisions, throughout Europe, of a United States based organization had a wide variety of sources for their IT support. Included were local IT, United States based IT, outside vendors and informal power user support. They were going to lose the United States and outside vendor support which even those with local IT depended on quite heavily. Because of its fragmented nature, they had no reliable base line for services or performance. They were in the process of developing a long-term strategy and needed a short-term solution that would solve the immediate support problem while being consistent with the future direction.

Problem Summary:

The purpose of the project was to develop a plan for the implementation of a European Regional Single Point of Contact (SPOC) Help Desk with interfaces to end users and level 2/3 support. This Help Desk was intended to provide basic required support for the European Users for a period of 1-2 years at which time it will either be discarded or used as a base for the development of a full service Help Desk.

The Approach:

Through the organization of a working team from the major business units across Europe and extensive interviews with end users, current support staff (both internal and external) and the IT staff, an overall list of potential services was developed. Follow up interviews were held with end users to determine critical areas of support as well as potential alternatives for services that would fall outside the scope of this project. Available resources across the European IT organizations were applied to these requirements to determine a final statement of work. A single centralized Help Desk was defined using common processes, tools, data elements and reporting while taking into consideration language, legal and cultural differences. This not only eliminated redundant resources but also allowed for trending and root cause analysis on a much larger base, leading to improved problem resolution time and staff productivity. As a result of the plan and other specific deliverables, the client was able to carry the project on to implementation on their own.

Successful Business Solutions

The client received:

  • Base Help Desk Organization Manual Outline including Organizational definitions, staffing requirements, Scope of services, Process
    Definitions, Tool evaluation,Communications, Training, etc.
  • Site Profile Survey
  • Help Desk Process Flows
  • Metrics List Detailed Specification
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