Assuming responsibility for a struggling service desk can be a daunting task. Assessing the ticketing system, phone system, SLAs, knowledge base and don’t forget the people, there’s a lot to do! Throughout my career in IT, I’ve enjoyed these challenging roles the most as I think that you learn the most when you’re personally stretched, and you have an opportunity to make a huge difference in the lives of others.
I was asked in late spring of 2023 to temporarily assume operations of my company’s IT service desk. Our service desk started around 2017, initially with 2 people working Monday-Friday from 9-5 providing secondary support to 700 restaurants in the US, mainly supporting the HR portal used by our employees. Since then, our company has grown in size to operating over 2,600 restaurants and the service desk now provides frontline support to 700 of them, secondary support to the other 1,900 as well as our corporate office and field leadership staff. We’ve now grown to 25 people working 21 X 7.
This is a story of intense company growth and how our service desk has (and has not) adjusted well to it. This is a story about changing ITSM solutions, from one that was nearly free to use to one that costs us over $100K annually in license fees and development. This is the story of countless departmental reorganizations – finding something that works only to change it again when additional staff is needed due to another surge in company growth. Lastly, this is a story about people – finding their way through obstacles, challenges, improvements and setbacks.
Over the next several months or so, I’m going to share with you my story – temporarily assuming responsibility for a service desk that was challenged by huge company growth. I’ll share with you where we started, what we’ve done, what worked (and what didn’t work). We’re a bit over one year into what is likely a 3-year journey to get to world class. My hope is that many of you can relate.
It all started on a late spring day in 2023. I was in charge of IT for about 450 restaurants in one of our restaurant brands minding my own business when my boss told me that the director over the service desk was resigning at the end of the day. “Would you mind keeping watch over the service desk?”, he asked. “No need to make any changes” he said. “We’ll have a replacement hired soon and then they can do what they’d like."
I told him that would be my pleasure as I’ve managed service desks for most of my 25-year IT career, so I had a good bit of experience here. I quickly started to review performance…they were 3 weeks behind in working non-critical incidents, a backlog of like 2,000 open incidents. I could see that the knowledge base was out of date and internal customer service scores were not good. However, what bothered me the most was that, out of a staff of 35, 1-2 people were quitting each week! The managers couldn’t hire people fast enough and there was no formal onboarding program once they did.
I met with the management staff to try and understand what I was seeing. Seems as though a large acquisition a few years ago was turning out to be quite the challenge for the team. The systems being used in them were old, wiring a mess, calls frequent and frustration high. While staff were added to compensate for the extra work, they seemingly could never get caught up. People began to leave due to frustration and burnout.
I told them I would help and went back to my boss with my initial findings and told him that I could not just stand by and watch this unfold. Turns out he was also struggling to get the right replacement for the position so I would have more time in the role than we both originally thought. He told me that making some changes would now be OK, but I’d need to run them by him first. I couldn’t wait to get started!
The first thing I wanted to do was to move into the room – yes, literally move my desk into the room where the service desk staff was located so I could see the operation firsthand. I e-mailed the staff and told them what I was going to do and told them not to be afraid, but to be open to telling me what worked for them and what did not, how we could service our internal customers better and what was in their way of doing so. My intent was purely to learn.
That next day I plucked myself down in an empty workspace right in the middle of the room. Despite some awkward moments, I spent many hours over the next few weeks sitting behind people asking questions, watching the team complete incidents, remote control restaurant equipment and get texted pictures of jumbled wiring to figure out why something wasn’t pingable. I watched them try to find things in the knowledge base (with mixed results). Some of the staff were open to me being there, some were nervous not knowing what to expect and some were, well, very open and critical. I saw lots of frustration when our systems and tools failed us or were inadequate to get the job done.
However, I also saw people going the extra mile to take care of an issue, I saw people exercising great patience in working with a largely non-technical user base. I saw people freely helping each other to get a restaurant back up. I saw engaged leadership, many newly promoted from a recent reorganization, trying to do their best while still settling into their new roles. This was home for me. I’ve faced these challenges several times before in my career and each time, as long as I found hope somewhere in the midst of the chaos, I knew that with hard work and time, we could build a desk that everyone would be proud of. My job now was to convince the staff that we could do it and to convince my boss that we can’t wait for the new director to start to begin making changes. The new director would have to pick up where I’d left off.
I felt like the team needed a central mission statement – something to get us all focused and unified. I wanted something that would resonate well with the team and also with senior leadership and something we could use to bounce any planned changes off of to make sure we were doing the right thing. This is what I wrote:
- Know and serve your customer: Our operators are our #1 priority. They are the ones who directly serve our guests, who pay our salaries and bring value to our shareholders. We must relentlessly serve them and their needs.
- Take care of our employees: Our service desk is the front line of IT support. Our service desk employees and their contributions are valuable, and their work is appreciated. Their thoughts, opinions and ideas deserve to be heard.
- Be efficient: We need to continually look at every aspect of our operations and find new ways to operate that are better, cheaper and faster, without sacrificing the first two bullets.
- Consistency is King: With 2,400 locations and thousands of above-store leadership, it is essential that the hardware and software in each of our stores and on our company owned devices be maintained as consistently as possible.
- Garbage in, Garbage out: It is just as important to be able to pull data out of our ticketing system as it is to put it in. If it is inputted in a way that makes it difficult to pull data back out, we’re wasting time, money and resources.
The management staff has an all-hands meeting every Tuesday afternoon. After a few weeks of being in the room, and after writing this mission statement, I asked if I could join it and share my findings. They agreed and I shared my observations and opportunities. I also shared my message of hope and the mission statement showing where we needed to go and asked for everyone’s support.
This is not a solo journey, I told them, and it will take time (probably a few years) and patience. In the back of my mind, I was thinking that I didn’t even know where to start as there was so much work to do and I didn’t feel like I even grasped all of what needed to be done yet! I’ve read many books on change management, and I knew that if we changed too much, too fast we could cause an even greater mess. Yet, if we changed nothing, the group would quickly lose faith. I still didn’t feel like everyone was on board with me even being involved as an outsider. We were still turning over 1-2 people per week, call volume was chaotic, and it seemed like all we were doing was interviewing, hiring, and training while falling further and further behind.
Some Key Takeaways:
When an opportunity presents itself, take it! I already had a full-time job and was certainly not in search of another. Opportunities like this allow you to learn new things and stretch your knowledge.
- Your frontline staff are the ones that know the most about how to run a service desk. Talk to them! Ensure that they are actively involved in any improvement initiatives in all stages.
- Don’t be in a rush to make changes! Ensure that you take as much time as needed to completely understand the current state of things before changing the operation.
- Look for hope. On the worst of days, if you can still see it, it’s all of the motivation that you need to move forward.
In next month’s article, I’ll share about how the management team and I put together a strategic plan for improvement, the origins of our “Inefficient Processes” committee and how we lost a bunch of staff last August due to a misunderstanding with HR. The journey continues…