IT Guide to Service Desk:

Best Practices & Top Challenges of Ticket Management

KACE
1616 North Shoreline Boulevard
Mountain View, California 94043
Telephone: (650) 316-1050 or (877) 646-8366
Email: info@kace.com
Web: www.kace.com
IT Guide to Service Desk
Keeping an organization working and productive is the challenge for help desk support technicians and
the enterprises they support. Downtime of personnel or computer devices for any reason means lost
productivity and reduced bottom-line revenue. To keep resources up and going, the IT help desk
requires a basic system with these features:

 Incident management. Help desk technicians require an incident management system to

receive and prioritize user requests, and then assign the ticket to the appropriate IT engineer
and track the issue to resolution. Help desk practices range from basic incident management
prioritization and remediation of help desk tickets to highly structured support of ITIL incident,
problem, configuration, change and release management services. Incident management
requires features for tracking help desk tickets, prioritizing IT team efforts and setting up queues
to resolve problems by priority and ability.
 Collaborative IT system. Integrated management tools and associated support information
allows the help desk technician to access targeted inventory reports, asset information, the
management history of each computer device and remote control and remediation capabilities
from a consolidated management console. IT teams are most effective in resolving problems
using a management system with focused reporting capabilities and integrated tools employed
from the help desk.
 Sequenced and automated workflows. Integrated management systems allow IT engineers to
design workflows to implement IT policies for common jobs such as setting up new users,
deploying new computers, updating patches and performing other management jobs where
sequenced and automated tasks are most effective.

A comprehensive help desk support system requires integration of services to automate ticket
management, provide access to vital information, reduce manual efforts and assure a high level of
 remote interaction. Efficient processes employ automated workflows and provide delivery metrics for
many of the standard support processes using common data and integrated services.

Challenges of Help Desk Support

In many ways, the help desk acts as the face and persona of the IT department to interact with users,
communicate problems and fixes and set the tone for support initiatives across an organization.
Challenges to the help desk system include ongoing communication of pressing issues, prioritization and
assignment of incidents, automation of services, and presentation of timely and useful network,
security, and device information.

Communication between user and IT engineer to describe, troubleshoot and resolve problems. Good
communication of problems between the IT team and the user starts with a submitted help desk
incident or user access to the IT portal that communicates common problems, outages, how-to's and
other widespread issues. Efficient interaction requires practices to enter and route new tickets, regulate
ongoing ticket tracking and route users to easy answers or escalate difficult problems. Users need to be
able to respond to IT questions, pose troubleshooting questions, suggest workarounds and direct users
to a web site or knowledgebase of common issues or historical fixes.

Prioritization of IT resources and automated ticket escalation of user requests, access to status reports
and matching the correct level of IT support is the goal to efficient help desk management. Proper help
desk support allows the IT engineer to devote resources to the highest priorities and provide messaging
to users on status or additional information required.

Trouble shooting and remediation. Easy access to all system information—inventory reports,
configuration status, device history as well as remote control and deployment capabilities—helps the
help desk technician troubleshoot and resolve tickets quickly. Help desk personnel need access to an
integrated, multi-functional IT management system that supports the frontline technician with accurate
and up-to-date information about all computer devices and assets on the network and the ability to
resolve any issues remotely. Help desk features should also be customizable and include online help for
users to diagnose and resolve incidents using knowledgebase articles and support information.

Automated processes require a help desk system using collaborative practices and integrated
management tools and process workflows. This requires associated system data shared by multiple IT
services.

Basic Practices for the Help Desk

IT teams incorporate these basic practices and processes when implementing help desk services:

Ticket Management
Managing tickets from the help desk requires a system to route, organize and prioritize user incidents
for the IT team, while providing feedback and communication with the user as the remediation process
progresses towards resolution. For the IT engineer, ticket management relies on configurable policies to
set up multiple support queues based on location of the IT engineer, skill set and workload to meet
focused and acceptable levels of administrative support. Ticket assignments can be automated to set up
categories of problems, and automated for transition to other queues providing hierarchical
relationships to care for work orders with dependent relationships of related tasks. For the user, proper
ticket management should allow access to improve first-time call resolution, allow for ongoing user
input, and provide notifications if the incident requires additional work or if the incident is not properly
addressed. It should also provide warnings of problems and possible workarounds for known issues.

Ticket Management also allows for permissions to access help desk tickets by the IT engineer and the
tracking of ongoing service tasks until process completion. Tickets need to be customizable, filtered to
sort and search for access and prioritization, and with the ability to escalate problem tickets and report
changes in ticket status to the appropriate personnel.

ITIL
The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of IT services and policies coordinated to manage an IT
infrastructure and its operations, providing a detailed description of important IT practices with
comprehensive checklists, administrative tasks and procedures used by the IT team to tailor support
needs for the organization. This framework of processes and services allow the IT team to standardize
practices to avoid common mistakes and reduce costs by focusing efforts and reducing overlapping IT
processes. It is fast becoming a worldwide de facto standard for organizing Service Management and
help desk activities.

ITIL services encompass all aspects of IT management, organized around the Help, or Service Desk, as a
single point of contact for customer problems and IT requests. The service desk attempts to resolve
problems directly, but also allows for incidents and requests to be logged, initiating a chain of services
which can be guided by various categories, including: Incident Management, Problem Management,
Configuration Management, Change Management and Release Management. These processes are then
tracked in the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to record the progress of each process and
generate reports with metrics for quality management.
As a means of concentrating service quality and focusing on business requirements, ITIL characterizes
the partnership between the IT team and the user in defining and regulating services. These services
begin with the help desk and the strategies and specific support tactics used by the IT team.

Help Desk Ticket and Queue Customization

Help desk features need to be fully customizable for each organization’s unique requirements, practices
and IT processes. Customization features should include the ability to make changes for individual fields
and their values, default settings, escalation rules, e-mail notifications, creation of multiple queues,
workflow routing rules and detailed view of incidents.

Capturing information from each device using inventory, asset and other IT solutions, it is then stored in
a common database from which reports are generated based on SQL queries and reporting features. IT
teams can define standard reports to display and customize the console to report information relevant
to each organization.
Workflow
Help desk support for each organization requires the ability to establish multiple support queues and
processes to govern the flow of incidents and best practices for their remediation. Tickets for each
incident need to be customizable, searchable and include features to let users take control of their
minor problems from the IT portal. Ticket assignments to IT personnel require automated polices based
on the ability of the IT engineer, and escalation notifications that send email alerts if tickets are not
addressed promptly.

Best practices for help desk workflows depend on automating ticket status transitions to make it easy to
improve responsiveness to user input. Tickets can be set up with parent-child relationships to automate
the closure of dependant tickets and add structure to related tasks required for remediation.

Escalation
Escalation of help desk incidents starts by the user accessing the IT portal for identification of common
user problems and, if possible, resolving problems using self-service actions. The IT portal allows users
access to a knowledge base, to view hardware and software inventory information, install approved
software packages and raise and view support requests. If interaction with the help desk technician is
needed, the user can submit a ticket to the frontline help desk technician to engage in the remediation
process. The help desk technician can then escalate more difficult problems to higher-level IT engineers.

Automated help desk queues and routing routines allow the level-one help desk technician to assign
higher-level engineers with the right expertise and available workload to handle difficult remediation
problems. The user is then notified by the system about the escalation and provided additional
interaction and ticket updates to resolve the issue.
Notifications
Notifications are part of the help desk workflow that keep users and the IT team apprised of changes
and progress in resolving incidents. As the help desk tracks service desk performance and
responsiveness to business needs, the user is notified of the need for additional information and
progress in resolving their issues. Progress notification and ad-hoc reporting to the user provides
visibility into incident resolution times, ownership of the incident, overall service desk workload and
problems or workarounds related to the original incident ticket.
KACE Vision
Our vision at KACE is to provide an appliance-based approach to systems management, to save time for
systems administration professionals, while saving money for their companies. The KACE™ family of
easy-to-use, comprehensive and affordable appliances fulfills all of the systems management needs of
organizations of all sizes, from initial computer deployment to ongoing management and retirement.
KACE appliances are available as both physical and virtual appliances.

The Appliance Advantage

KACE appliances make efficient computer management and server management a reality by providing a
low cost alternative to computer management software using an appliance-based architecture. Simply
plug the appliance into your network, give it an IP address and you are ready to begin managing all your
desktops, laptops and servers. Unlike traditional computer management software, KACE appliances
typically deploy in one day. And because KACE appliances are fully integrated and pre-configured, there
are no hardware or software pre-requisites, no professional service fees and no hidden costs. It’s all in
the appliance!

Easy-to-Use
Built from the ground up to enable systems administrators of every level and background, KACE
appliances are by far the easiest to use systems management solution available. From its simple plug
and play architecture which virtually eliminates installation and maintenance, to its familiar web-like
tabbed interface, KBOX is sure to transform your systems management generalist into a systems
management guru, not in months or years, but days and weeks.

Comprehensive
KACE appliances pre-integrate and pre-configure all of the functionality needed to solve your end-to-end
systems management challenges. From initial OS deployment to device discovery and inventory,
software distribution, asset management, patch management, security audit and enforcement, help
desk and more, KBOX does it all.

Affordable
KACE appliance owners enjoy the lowest total cost compared to software alternatives. From plug and
play deployment, to the ability to perform “one click” appliance software updates, and automated
maintenance such as nightly backup, KACE appliances are designed to be both immediately productive
as well as trouble-free for the long term, ultimately saving you the most time and money.

About KACE
KACE™ is the leading Systems Management Appliance company. Our appliance-based approach to
managing desktops, laptops and servers saves time and money for systems management professionals
and their organizations. The award-winning KBOX™ appliance typically installs in one day, at the lowest
total cost compared to software alternatives. KACE is headquartered in Mountain View, California. To
learn more about KACE and its product offerings, please visit http://www.kace.com or call 1-877-MGMT-
DONE.