Discussion on:

Setting up a successful help desk--physical considerations

Help desk-only coffee maker

Other more pragmatic considerations
-white boards - give the team the ability to sketch out ideas, lists, etc. great if visible to all from a centralized area

-centralized locked cabinet or room - secure storage of items while they are not being worked on (i.e. laptops) and/or other valuable items (i.e. master copies of software)

Input from an acoustic consultant can make a huge difference in the working environment for a help desk or any kind of call center.

By considering the types of ceiling tiles, divider panels, and other room treatments, overall noise level in the room can be reduced and noise interference from other conversations can be either supported or attenuated, as suits the working organization of the center.

These treatments should be considered hand-in-hand with decisions about density and layout of the workspace, and selection of headsets or other coms equipment.

The end result is not only improved working conditions, but also less chance of having to deal with noise-related stress and hearing damage, resulting from trying to compensate for poor acoustics by cranking up the headset levels.

I worked in one call center prior to my present job. I was able to support Postal employees, business partners, & retail customers all over the country & US possessions from my cubicle.

My current position is in a campus environment where most of the 800+ employees are concentrated in three buildings. The employees (and their managers) get irate if I attempt to do any remote troubleshooting. They insist all work MUST be done at the deskside. Some will absolutely refuse to make the few keystrokes required to get their computer name or IP address. (That's MY job, you see...) We have a growing remote sales force & 10 remote offices, only two of which have an on-site IT presence.

This is a textbook case of how not to run a helpdesk. At any given time, I have any number of employees demanding that I drop whatever I am doing & come running to fix whatever problem they are having, from a dirty mouse to an Exchange Server outage. The "management" decided to do away with the phone queue since no one was ever at his desk to answer the phone. They bought Intuit's Track-It! system which allows users to enter tickets directly through a web-interface. A few users follow the procedure. Unfortunately, the ones who play by the rules get the worst service because the "Squeaky Wheels" overwhelm us daily.

The users range from high-school dropouts to board members who cannot find their H: drive, or "My Computer" for that matter. There is no training department for a $1.5 bil company who, with joint-venture staff included, has nearly 1,000 users & dozens of custom applications. PC literacy is not even considered by hiring managers. One pharmacist (a very educated individual, but completely PC illiterate) washed out after a month because she simply could not do her job even with nearly continuous attention from the IS department. It simply never occurred to anyone to ask her if she knew how to use e-mail or common desktop applications before she was hired.

Each member of the Helpdesk builds & deploys their own Ghost images for PCs with no standardization. (None of them change the SID) A couple of us load PC Anywhere on everything, the rest do not. If they do load it, they make up a user & password that is non-standard so no one else can connect to it. Some machines have licensed corporate anti-virus software; others have someone's personal copy of Norton AV. Some have other software that I have never heard of. P2P apps are our largest software vendors. Two members of the Helpdesk insist on installing apps such as MS Office from CDs instead of the administrative share I created & customized when I first arrived. Each time a user needs a new feature, or a new user logs on, it prompts to insert the disk because it cannot locate the installation source. Not to mention the disks are a couple of service packs & several patches out of date. One member of the helpdesk has decided to move user's incoming mail to a .pst file (on the user's c: drive in some cases --he doesn't know that the "local settings" part of the profile doesn't upload with the rest of a roaming profile) to "save space" on the servers.

As if the users weren't bad enough, one of the Network Engineers decided to resolve a registry permissions problem with one application by making "Everyone" a member of the "Administrators" group on each workstation. Every new piece of adware, BHO, or other crap the users pick up from surfing install unimpeded. Then the knuckleheads complain to HR when porno & other ads popup on their PC.

I got a particular chuckle out of the mention of "mentoring" in the article. A couple of times a week, I will write a blurb on some topic that happens to have my interest & relates directly to the everyday environment. I e-mail the article to each of my team members, my supervisor, and the Network Engineers. (BTW, I have more education, certifications, and in most cases, experience than anyone else.) Inevitably, a few days or weeks after I write something, someone will spend hours troubleshooting the exact scenario I outlined and resolved in one of my rants. They will eventually make their way through the other team members without results and finally ask me. My usual response is to direct them to their e-mail to read what I wrote. One example is an article I sent out last July about a new RPC vulnerability in Windows. I downloaded the patches to a network location and let everyone know what was coming. You probably know what happened in the middle of August. All of the clustered servers crashed, most of the workstations (since some people didn't believe in automatic updates -- causes the computer to crash, you know) slowed to a crawl. The network was unusable for two days due to ICMP & RPC locator broadcasts.

I'm all for customer support. I work more tickets, undocumented issues, business process issues, application support, housekeeping, and software deployment (gasp, automated software deployment!) than anyone in the company. In my last "Review" I was chastised for being "unapproachable" because I turn away users who don't follow procedures or pester me with personal issues (I want a black one... or, Can I have a flat screen?) I am the only one who supports on-campus users via phone & remote control (I push VNC from a batch file). My thanks for efficiency, hard work, 70+ hour workweeks, doing application support, network administration, business process support, and becoming the liaison between development & production -- without compensation? Try a negative review and a $.77/hr increase after nine months. (I earned more as a welder with a few years experience and no college education. Come to think of it, my employer paid for my certifications and study time back then...)

If you have stuck with me this far, you are truly a masochist. I know what you are probably thinking, and I am way ahead of you. I took a night class and got my CDL class "A" license a few weeks ago. It looks like I'll be driving a truck for a while...

The point of this ranting, if there is one, is this: Like any other undertaking, a lack of focus, goals, leadership and a defined mission will result in disaster. We did get a new Director last July who is probably a very good leader, but he is utterly powerless to effect any real change since the entrenched management ( a bunch of truly stupid people ) led by the technologically ignorant COO oppose any change to the user environment. (Oh, by the way, the COO often personally assigns tasks to engineering, helpdesk & telecomm personnel without consulting our Supervisor, Director, VP, etc.)

Enjoy your job tomorrow!

Last semester, I was assistant to the Technology Coordinator at my local high school. I thought that it would be a moderately enlightening experience, despite the fact that our Tech. Coordinator has never (to my knowledge) recieved any certifications or has gained knowledge in any modern network OSs. Since we are a small school district (about 950 K-12), the Tech. Coord. is the Help Desk, Network Admin, and whatever else. Most of my days (thankfully, I only went through this torture one hour a day) were filled with updating antivirus programs (despite the fact that this COULD be done from a centralized point...it makes too much sense) and fixing/sharing/cleaning printers. Additionally, the Tech. Coord. had the great idea of giving each client on the network a static IP address in order to relieve some sort of management problem (probably not knowing how to properly configure DHCP), if I remember correctly. At the end of the ordeal, I had learned a few lessons on how NOT to do things. Needless to say, I have taken the lessons to work and will take them to college next year when I learn (hopefully) how to do things the right way.

This was just another little rant, but I thought that it would show that the problem of unknowlegdeable IT staff plagues more than one organization.

I find, in my neck of the woods at least, the people who do the hiring for helpdesk, or the people who hire helpdesk managers, often don't know the first thing about what the helpdesk is supporting. In looking for a job, I am often undercut by competetion that doesn't know what thier doing, because they come at a little less cost, and know how to bs in an interview rather than know what they're actually saying.
This local market of help-desk watering-down has made it very frustrating, and I've been stuck in the same place for 2 years on a pay that I can't safely live on.

Your right with the Heat Plus VOIP system, find our more: