SharePoint in Action: The IT Help Desk

 This post is a follow-up to my SharePoint In Action overview post which can be found at SharePoint In Action: An Overview .

If you’re part of a small start-up it can be very difficult to effectively manage your IT issues without things falling through the cracks.  The challenges only get harder as you grow.  At Swimfish I’ve been leveraging the power of SharePoint to gain deeper insight into our IT-related issues, ensure that items do not slip through the cracks, and to provide users with a higher degree of confidence that their issues will be resolved. 

While my use of SharePoint for managing IT Help Desk issues is fairly new, as noted when I discussed my use of PIR, I wanted to take some time to share with you how we’ve constructed the site, the early successes that I’ve seen, and some insights into where the site will eventually go.

HOW? (WSS 3.0)

1. All good things in SharePoint begin with the Site Actions menu.  Select it and choose Create.
2. From the Create page choose Sites and Workspaces.  Choose the Help Desk Site (under application Templates), name it, etc.., and choose Create.  You now have a basic help desk system.
3. In order to make this useful I then went into the site I created and chose View All Site Content (in the upper left-corner) and edited the Keywords list.
   1. Keywords represent the categories that you are using to funnel help desk requests through the system.  For example, I created IOD (for our InterAction On Demand product), SOD (our SharePoint On Demand product), Phone Problems, Network Problems, etc..
4. I once again opened the View All Site Content option and edited the Experts list.  Here I defined the leads for each of the problem areas (keywords) I defined in the step above.
5. I wanted to update the form and views within the help system to work optimally for myself and my team.  Here are the minor changes that I made:
   1. I selected my favorite menu, Site Actions and then Site Settings.
   2. I selected Site Libraries and List and chose to customize service requests.  I simply removed the customer field as I don’t feel the need for my teammates to have to look up their names.  SharePoint keeps track of who created the requests and that’s all I need to know.
   3. The final piece was to go in and add the Created By field to all of my views so that I would know who entered the request.

CURRENT STATUS

   The team is getting used to the new system, nothing happens overnight.

•  The company is entering tickets instead of running up to the IT team (unless it’s an emergency) , the system is definitely beginning to work.
• We have resolved several tickets in the system and users have visibility into the state of their requests.  Nothing is slipping through the cracks so it has definitely resolved one of my major issues with our old processes.
• I have alerting setup at ever step of the process, so IT folks are alerted when task come in.  We are headed in the right direction.

CRYSTAL BALL TIME…  THE FUTURE

I am always a proponent of iterative processes and incremental improvements and this help desk system is no different.   Here are a few things that I will want to do with the system over time:

• Integrate it with our CRM system.  Some help items related to our hosted offerings or specific customers.  When the issues are related to specific clients I want to get that information back into our CRM system.
• Integrate with our SharePoint project management system.  Many IT tasks are hard to plan for but do impact schedules.  My goal is to tie this work back to our project tracking system for real-time schedule updates and to provide information that we can use to better estimate our IT headcount needs.

I’ll let everyone know how this system evolves.  Keep watching for more postings in the SharePoint in Action series.  Stay tuned.

John