We are a Service Desk in an agile organization. That doesn't mean that we ourselves work entirely according to kanban or scrum as a Service Desk. But it does mean that we have the same mindset and use whatever we can to work more efficiently.
Lean is also a form of agile, and we get a lot of benefits from that as well. One of the things we've learned from Lean is to reduce waste. Something we gained a lot from two years ago. Because everything is constantly changing, new waste easily creeps into a process. High time to take another good look at our work process with the knowledge we have today.
At the Service Desk, we do many different jobs, but our primary process is answering questions and resolving incidents. Therefore, that is the process we focused on first. Because we want to keep you well informed about the status and have as much as possible automated, we keep changing our process. But always from the current status. As a result, just like ANVA 4/5, more and more is added to that process and it secretly becomes more and more complex. Fortunately, Thijs van den Brink was happy to think along with us. We put the whole process aside and re-signed him. As a result, we went from 13 statuses down to 9 and gave incidents and questions each their own workflow. For queries, this way we go back from 13 statuses to 7, since a query never gets attached to an RFC (software error). So why should you as an employee on the Service Desk be able to make a choice to do so? Every choice takes time and so does every extra click, to do the right process step. Because you are more tightly controlled by the process, there is less chance of making mistakes. Then questions and incidents are less likely to accidentally get out of the picture and you, the customer, will get a response faster.
But that's not the only benefit. We also made sure in the new workflow that the process steps and statuses have the same names as the processes in the rest of the organization. This makes them recognizable to anyone who wants to help, which saves explanations and corrections. We can now collaborate even more easily within the organization. A question is now no longer called a service request on our side, but Service Request. So that our team in India also understands what it means.
In addition to the process itself, we also revisited triggers and fields that need to be filled in. Aren't we filling in too many fields? Aren't we getting mailed flat out by triggers? All questions that help identify waste. For example, we now almost no longer get triggers by mail, but work with a dashboard. That way we can all respond to triggers and not just the colleague who used to receive the mail. On that dashboard we see, for example, that you have asked a question in a ticket to which we have not yet responded. If the colleague where the ticket is is sick or on vacation, then other colleagues take over the notification to respond to the question or comment. This way we hope to respond faster without receiving more emails that we have to deal with. Another example are tickets that go beyond the agreed resolution time within three days. We now see these in time so we can help each other or take over tickets from each other. If a colleague has so many tickets and several also run out of time within three days, we already know this is not going to work. Then it's better to redistribute them so that we have more colleagues working on the right calls.
Viewing the dashboard is part of our day start. Something we have been doing for years on the service desk. At 9:15 we start the day together, we look at what the workload is, how it is distributed and what consultations there are that day. That way we know we are doing the right things and have enough staffing in the phone throughout the day. Since Corona, we also do this in the afternoons. We don't see each other all day because of working from home. In the afternoon we have the opportunity to ask help questions and share important things with each other. And of course also to have a laugh with each other, because job satisfaction also helps enormously to work fast and well.
Another way to improve is to prevent errors and questions. For this reason, we as a service desk have taken a big role in testing. We help write realistic test scenarios and also provide hands to the development teams to run tests. This way, we catch even more errors before they reach you, the customer. Questions we are trying to prevent more and more by improving ANVA Help, the ANVA Knowledge Base and tours of ANVA Hub. For example, we are currently redesigning ANVA Help on more modern technology. This will allow us to make changes easier and faster and make searching easier for you. Something we also like and want to do more often is to create tutorials. Short movies that explain the setup or operation of a module. From now on, we will join the reviews as Team Service Desk. The demos we will be giving there will mainly be about improvements we are implementing in all tools to provide you with quick answers. If you can easily look it up yourself, you will have a quick answer and we will have more time to solve errors and to help improve the quality of our software.
In short we keep looking for improvements! If you have any tips for us, feel free to let me know and we will work on them.
