Running an IT Support Desk

I work on the support desk for a small but growing managed services provider and my boss has been increasingly hinting that he wants me to pretty much manage the service side of things.

I've been in IT for nearly ten years working in a variety of support roles, so I'm confident in my technical skills, but I've never actually had to manage anything.

Lately I've been tasked with developing a number of different processes so we can have some sort of standard to adhere to as we grow, but this is where I'm starting to run into a block.

I guess some of the things I'm looking for are:

- New client onboarding processes, best practices, checklists, resources, etc for when we bring on a new client. I've been having troubles finding how other MSP's go through the process of brining on new clients and it's something I need to improve on.

- Basic best practices and processes for the service desk team. Aside from answering phones and picking their nose all day, what can I have them be doing? I already created a checklist for the beginning of their shift to review backup notifications, review the support box, and go through any tickets generated by our monitoring software and placed into our PSA. Of course they should be monitorning the support queue for any incoming requests but we're trying to be extremely proactive with our clients and would like them to work on maintaining clients networks...

If anyone can provide some resources, tutorials, suggestions, it would be massively, hugely appreciated. happy

Cheers!

Tags: windows, career, it management, networks, it support

Mr-J

19th Dec

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New client onboarding process

is probably going to depend on your HR team as much as anything. When we worked on our process it was a team effort with the HR department and a few key managers to figure out what they wanted provided, you should probably talk to them in the first instance to see what their expectations are. As for being proactive, that will also depend on what monitoring systems you have in place (if any) - should the service desk be watching a monitoring application to check for slow responses, volumes reaching capacity, possible outages? What about AV and patch monitoring, perhaps they should be making sure all AV is up to date on a central system or that patches have been applied to the required systems and reaching out to those that aren't updating to find out why. You could also get them working on cheat sheets for common software applications, how to documentation, reviewing tickets to find problem trends or frequently asked questions, etc

OurITLady

19th Dec

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Thanks for the response but...

We don't have an HR team. Not to speak of anyway. Not sure why HR would be involved in onboarding new clients anyway.

We are mostly an MSP though, and we're using Labtech for our monitoring, patch rollout, AV management etc. But I've never really been tasked with coming up with documentation and processes and the best I've come up with so far is a Master IT Spreadsheet which contains a tab for pretty much everything... Tab for AD users, vendors, ISP, hardware, blah, blah blah.. What I'm really trying to find and where I'm coming up a little short is finding best practices for the onboarding process of new clients.

Mr-J 27th Dec