IT Problem Management [Paperback]

Gary Walker (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 013030770X | ISBN-13: 978-0130307705 | Publication Date: March 17, 2001 | Edition: 1

Whether you manage in-house or outsourced IT operations, your problem resolution processes may be the #1 factor that will determine your ultimate success or failure. What's more, help desks are increasingly called upon to "move up the food chain," becoming true service centers capable of delivering complex, strategic solutions. Finally, there's a single source for all the information you need to build world-class problem management processes -- and deliver the value today's enterprises are demanding. Drawing upon extensive real-world consulting experience, Gary Walker presents specific process improvements IT organizations and outsourcers can make to achieve breakthrough results in their help desks and service centers. Walker reviews every key element of the problem management process, including problem identification, customer validation, problem logging, service delivery, knowledge capture and sharing, and finally, management review and oversight. Walker introduces the Immediate Response Model, which gives IT managers a formal way to account for request variability, complexity, and volume; shows how to use metrics to measure your progress; and offers guidance on creating and using service level agreements. The book includes a detailed chapter on tools for communications with customers, service delivery, and proactive monitoring, as well as opportunities to use the Internet and Integrated Voice Response (IVR) systems to empower customers. Finally, Walker addresses the human side of help desks and service centers, offering practical guidance on motivation.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

The complete "best practices" guide to IT problem resolution!

No matter how professional your IT organization, if you can't resolve problems quickly and effectively, you'll lose your stakeholders' confidence—and fail. Nowadays, help desk s aren't enough: companies want true service centers capable of delivering complex, strategic solutions. IT Problem Management is the first single source for building world-class problem management processes. Drawing upon his extensive consulting e xperience, Gary Walker presents specific improvements you can make to achieve breakthrough results in any help desk or service center—in-house or out-sourced. Coverage includes:

• Problem identification, customer validation, problem lo gging, service delivery, knowledge capture and sharing, and management oversight
• The Immediate Response Model: accounting for problem variability, complexity, and volume
• Detailed metrics for measuring your responsiveness
• Bett er ways to create and use service level agreements
• State-of-the-art tools for customer interaction, service delivery, and proactive monitoring
• New Internet and knowledge base systems: empowering users to solve their own problems
• The human side: staffing, retention, and motivation

IT Problem Management isn't just theory: it delivers real-world case studies, detailed benchmarks, and practical solutions for turning your help desk into a high-performance I T service center, starting today.

About the Author

GARY WALKER is a leading IT consultant, helping Fortune 500 and emerging growth companies focus on the people, processes, and technology required to operate a highly reliable and cost effective infrastructure.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall; 1 edition (March 17, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 013030770X
• ISBN-13: 978-0130307705
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #360,143 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Complete Guide to Service Center Processes, April 30, 2001

By 

Richard Heroux (Woodbridge, VA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: IT Problem Management (Paperback)

This is a great book for anyone involved in help desk or service center activities. I recommend this book for all IT professionals involved with production systems or anyone interested in IT methodology. This book gives the reader an appreciation for the documented processes and documentation that must be in place for a successful help desk venture.

This book has process flows for the entire problem management arena complete with guidelines on how to pick the most successful strategy for your company. It helps you with the decision process by offering pros and cons for each strategy so that you can tailor the strategy for your own goals and objectives. Also present are strategies for escalating problems and the structure that must be in place to support the strategy.

Other strong points of this book include the detail provided concerning the problem prioritization process, documented Triage processes, and escalation procedures. It also covers the documentation that must exist in order for a help desk to strive for cost effectiveness while meeting the goals of its customers.

This books helps IT professionals in the decision making process, whether you are currently involved in help desk activities, preparing to start a help desk, or migrating your current help desk into a service center. I gave this book to our help desk and they quickly ordered a couple of copies for the other managers. This is truly a first rate narrative.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unique book that fills a gap in service delivery literature, April 25, 2001

By 

Mike Tarrani "www.tarrani.com" (Deltona, FL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: IT Problem Management (Paperback)

This book does, indeed, represent the first of its kind to extend problem management from a help desk function to an enterprise-wide process. Moreover, it contains some of the best practices and processes I have ever seen in print.

Here are some of the highlights of what the book proposes that I know from experience works in an optimal fashion:

*Managed response model, where the help desk validates issues, prioritizes them and sends them immediately to the proper tier-2 group for resolution. This is far superior to a model where the help desk attempts to resolve the issue because too many go to tier-2 anyway. In my experience the managed response model more closely aligns IT to business (tier-2 also functions in an account management role if the process and organization is mature), and there is no hand-off (tier-2 owns the problem, the help desk owns the problem management process).

*The concept of a service catalog (sometimes called reference data or systems taxonomy) that allows you to capture metrics that lend themselves to Pareto analysis for system failures, etc. This is important for prioritizing fixes and patches to be released in future versions of an application.

*Clear definitions of severity, priority, escalation and elevation. These are too often misunderstood or misused terms, yet each is an important element of problem management.

*Detailed process for escalation and notification, which is not always implemented properly if implemented at all.

*Linking problem management to service level objectives and business goals. This is alluded to in many help desk books, but rarely addressed in the detail that this book provides.

*Alignment of problem management to other related processes, notably, change management. Finally, this dependency is recognized and discussed in a mainstream book. *Complete strategy for gathering and analyzing *relevant* metrics. Some gaps, but the approach is on target.

*Service delivery as a concept and process is clearly described. I cannot count the times I have had to define "service delivery" and distinguish it from "application delivery" (the former addresses supporting applications in production, the latter is how they are developed and released into production - operations and maintenance vs. development and project management).

Nothing is perfect, and here are some of the gaps I found:

*No clearly defined acceptance criteria for bringing applications into production - the service center (help desk) should get, at a minimum, service level agreements, application profiles, troubleshooting guides and a criticality profile for every application going into production. These should be considered to be the minimum entry criteria for supporting an application.

*Excellent discussion on priorities was marred by a lack of discussion about how to go about establishing a uniform baseline. I use a spreadsheet developed with a colleague that computes a criticality profile based on quantitative and qualitative measures. In my opinion there needs to be an enterprise-wide set of criteria for determining the criticality of applications if prioritization of issues is going to be repeatable.

*While the metrics approach is comprehensive it does not address aged issues. Consider how much more effective and meaningful it is to know how many open issues are over 1, 2, 4 and 6 weeks old, and how many from each of these buckets have been closed during a current reporting week. Contrast this with a simpler total open vs. closed this week measurement and you will see how the simpler measurement does not show the true effectiveness of the support organization.

Despite the gaps I noted this book makes an invaluable contribution to service delivery and IT process maturity. Overall I am impressed with the author's approach and consider this book to be essential reading for help desk managers, service delivery professionals and upper IT management. This book with jump-start service delivery if your company does not have clearly defined processes and procedures, and will give those that do some excellent ideas on raising the bar. Gaps notwithstanding, this book earns a solid 5 stars.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars At long last - a book that goes beyond the help desk, March 26, 2001

By 

Linda Zarate "IT Ops Consultant" (Azusa, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: IT Problem Management (Paperback)

Finally! A book that addresses the fact that problem management goes far beyond the help desk domain and extends to encompass all of IT. Problem management the key to IT/business alignment because it directly supports achieving reliability, availability and service objectives.

The approach taken in this book is, like all other books in the Enterprise Computing Institute series, to address people, process and technology.

The authors start this book with standard fare on help desk organization. This information is available in virtually every help desk book on the market. However, the discussion becomes interesting when process is introduced. I thought the chapters on response models and service catalogs were particularly valuable. They certainly reflect the best practices that I have had to discover on my own as a service delivery consultant.

Because I develop and implement service delivery solutions for a living I was gratified to see a chapter on this discipline. While I found little new here (I do this for a living), the approach is sound and the focus on tiers 2 and 3 roles and responsibilities is something that is consciously missing from all of the books on help desk management that I have read.

I did learn a lot from the chapter on knowledge capture and sharing. This is an area that I have found to be weak in every organization in which I have had a consulting engagement. While there has been a lot written about capturing and sharing knowledge at the tier 1 (help desk) level, little has been written prior to this book about capturing and sharing knowledge across IT from a problem management point of view. Although this chapter does not provide detailed solutions it does give ideas and a good starting point from which to approach this aspect of IT problem management.

The book ends with four final chapters that give a high-level overview of managing the process, service level agreements, service center tools and how to motivate IT participants in the problem management process.

This book fills a large void in the IT service delivery body of knowledge because it is the first to address problem management as something larger than help desk operations. It extends the problem management process to tiers 2 and 3, which is something that the help desk books seem to only briefly address if they address it at all. Moreover, this book contains processes that are essential for aligning IT to business. As such this is a valuable addition to the professional body of knowledge for help desks and technical support specialists. If you work in production services or IT management you should definitely read this book you will also find the information in this book to be invaluable.