From Cinderella to profit centre: service desks that pay their way
The service desk is often the most overworked, least appreciated team in IT. It carries the complaints, absorbs the blame and gets the first budget cut. Yet a service desk that works is one of the most valuable teams in the business: fewer repeat problems, happier people, and IT that costs less to run. I help companies get there, usually with the people and tools they already have.
Recognise any of these?
- Tickets bounce between teams before anyone fixes them.
- The same incidents keep coming back.
- You can’t say what your service desk costs — or what it earns back.
- Good people are leaving the desk, or it’s hard to hire for.
- Users work around the service desk instead of using it.
Recognise even one? Then this page is for you.
What I fix
Tickets that go in circles
I trace real tickets end to end and fix categorisation, assignment and ownership, so problems are solved once, by the right person.
The same incidents, every week
A Pareto analysis of your ticket data finds the vital few repeat causes; a problem and knowledge routine makes the fixes stick.
Changes that break things
Risk-based change enablement: routine changes pre-approved, risky ones properly reviewed, and a change calendar the desk can see.
Requests that take days
A short service catalogue built from real request volumes, with a standard path for the most common requests.
Reports nobody believes, and a cost nobody can explain
A handful of measures that matter, agreed with the business, and a simple picture of what the desk costs and what it saves.
A team that’s worn out
Clear roles, a knowledge base that doesn’t live in three people’s heads, and coaching for the team leaders.
The Service Desk Assessment
The quickest way to find out what’s really going on. Over about a month I score six practices — Service Desk, Incident, Problem, Change Enablement, Service Request Management and Continual Improvement — on a simple five-point maturity scale. You don’t need to have adopted ITIL or any other framework. You get a score, three or four quick wins ranked by impact, and a roadmap for what follows.
What you get
- An independent score for each practice, in plain English.
- Areas for improvement, ranked by the risk they reduce and the value they deliver.
- Three or four quick wins, ranked by impact.
- A roadmap for the months ahead.
- A dashboard and review routine your own team can run.
Who it’s for
Mid-sized and larger companies, often international, with an in-house or outsourced service desk. Usually you’re the CFO, COO, owner or head of IT, and you’ve noticed the cost more than the value.
Afterwards
Coaching for your service desk managers; ITIL 5 training for the team; a quarterly review to keep the momentum; or a wider assessment covering more practices. I’m an accredited PeopleCert trainer, so the training and the improvement fit together.
Proof: a service desk built to hard targets
Challenge. A major investment bank needed a service desk that worked from day one, under hard targets: phones answered within three rings, an engineer on site within 15 minutes, a fix within the hour. Then a merger arrived, and the same desk had to serve four times as many people: 2,000 users became 8,000.
What I did. I built the desk, and redesigned the ticketing approach so that every call told the truth about workload. I corrected the IT-asset records behind it and checked the maintenance bills against them.
Outcome. Accurate workload data for planning; asset records the bank could rely on; and real savings on maintenance billing. Finance asked me to explain the numbers, and the numbers held.
Why it matters to you. A service desk that measures itself honestly can defend its budget. That is the discipline I bring to every Service Desk Assessment.
Not sure it’s worth a conversation?
Thirty minutes, no obligation. You’ll leave with two or three things worth fixing first.