What Is a Service Desk Manager?

The service desk manager (SDM) is a critical role in any information technology service management (ITSM) operation. The manager is responsible for overseeing the day-to-day activities of service-desk operations to ensure users and business teams receive the support they require. The role is part general management, part service operations, and part special projects. In addition to managing a potentially large staff of support agents, a service help desk manager typically monitors operations to make sure tickets are addressed in a timely manner and serves as the help desk liaison to the rest of the business.

IT Service Desk Management

In most organizations, the service desk is often one of the largest single functions, spanning multiple teams, locations, and shifts. Managing this large operation requires strong people management skills. Common activities include:

• Hiring employees

• Training

• Staff scheduling

• Vendor management

• Budgeting and cost management

• Process definition

• Tools selection

IT Service Operations

In addition to general management activities, the manager is also the leader of a critical ITSM function that processes a large volume of service requests each day. The manager is responsible for providing smooth operations and for ensuring SLAs are fulfilled and service-desk clients are happy with the support they receive. Common service operations activities for the manager include:

• Mentoring

• Escalations

• Executive communications

• Workload balancing

• Operational performance monitoring

• Continuous improvement

• SLA compliance

• Managing shift hand-offs

Most service-desk operations are based on standard frameworks, such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), and a clearly defined set of internal processes and policies controls operations and guides the activities of individual agents. Most managers have some form of ITIL certification and many years of experience in both executing and managing ITSM processes.

Ensuring Uninterrupted Business Operations

The help desk is a continuous operations function, but because of its importance in IT service operations, service desk staff members are often asked to contribute to other important service management and business activities. The manager will often participate in these activities directly or oversee a small staff contributing to project work, including:

• Major incidents

• Changes and releases

• Disaster recovery planning

• Reorganizations/M&A efforts

• ITSM tool implementation projects

The manager’s goal is to leverage their experience and influence to minimize potential disruption to business activities.

The manager’s job is stressful, with many activities occurring simultaneously, which requires time management and prioritization skills. Most managers work designated shifts, passing responsibilities among peers to enable follow-the-sun support of business operations. In small organizations where the service desk is available during limited business hours, the manager is often “on-call” to provide after-hours coordination support. A typical day for a manager will be a combination of planned activities, operational monitoring, and involvement in escalations and process exceptions.

• Receive transition from the previous shift’s manager and discuss any outstanding critical items at hand-off.

• Review current major incidents, scheduled outages, and business events for the day to assess any adjustments to staffing plans.

• Review shift staffing to understand who is working, their skills, and how much capacity the service desk has for the day. The manager may need to shift workloads among resources throughout the day.

• Address SLA areas of concern. Often SLA targets will include multiple shifts. The manager will evaluate IT service requests approaching or exceeding their SLAs and may adjust staff priorities.

• Assign staff for in-flight work. Any requests in progress during a shift hand-off are assigned to a receiving agent and a transition is conducted from the agent leaving their shift.

• Review operational metrics and note areas for attention. The manager will review metrics and reports throughout each day to adjust staffing and workflows as needed to optimize service desk performance.

• Follow up on customer-satisfaction issues and user-feedback responses. The manager is responsible for client satisfaction and will typically review any negative feedback or concerns clients have raised as a part of the post-ticket satisfaction survey.

• Mentor staff. The manager is responsible for staff productivity as well as ensuring positive client perceptions. He or she will often mentor staff about customer-service skills as well as technical issues.

• Monitor tickets and calls. Managers will often monitor incoming service-desk tickets to understand broad trends and identify dependencies that individual agents can’t see when working on an individual ticket.

• Manage escalated issues. The manager is the escalation point for any incidents, service requests, or issues. During a typical shift, a manager may spend as much as half of their time managing escalations.

• Prepare hand-off summary report. At the end of each shift, the manager is responsible for preparing a summary of open issues and conducting a hand-off to their peer on the next shift.

• Focus on staffing activities. In addition to managing operational activities, the manager will typically spend 10–25% of their day on general staffing activities, such as hiring, training, budgeting, scheduling, and conducting performance reviews.

The manager is arguably one of the most challenging roles in many IT organizations and requires a high degree of skills and experience. Hiring for this position can be challenging, as both skillset and mindset are important to the candidate’s success.

• General management experience: The manager will manage people, budgets, schedules and business relationships. Due to the high-stress nature of the position, management maturity is essential.

• Ability to work well with people and express empathy: Managing escalations and critical incidents creates an environment of great tension, which can impact the interpersonal dynamics between agents and service desk clients. The manager must be able to express empathy and help staff to work through high-stress situations in a professional manner.

• Applying conflict-management skills: Service desk tickets are often escalated when the client is frustrated with the response he or she is receiving from the agent assigned to the issue. Managers use conflict-resolution skills to address client frustration and diffuse tense situations.

• Prioritizing the work of others: Business rules and automation are typically used to prioritize service requests; however, managers are responsible for balancing workloads across teams and agents to maximize productivity, minimize costs and ensure SLA compliance.

• Assessing the impact of a situation: Service desk managers are responsible for assessing potentially critical incidents and making triage decisions about business impact, urgency and criticality. Impact-assessment skills and experience are essential.

• Managing multiple priorities: During a shift, a manager will be managing a wide variety of activities that compete for their time and attention. It is imperative the manager is able both to multitask and provide focused attention on high-priority issues to ensure all important activities are addressed.

• Working in a high-stress environment: Service desks are a high-stress environment. Managers must be able to manage effectively their stress and coach staff on stress-management techniques.

• Communicating with executives and business stakeholders: The manager is the face of service-desk operations to management and business stakeholders. Effective verbal and written communication skills are critical to keeping stakeholders informed, influencing decisions, and developing healthy business relationships with company leaders.

• Data-driven decision-making: Data is the lifeblood of modern service management. Managers must be astute consumers of operational data and skilled in using data to make informed decisions.

A manager should be evaluated both on the operational performance of their team and on their effectiveness in working with people. Both objective metrics and subjective feedback should be utilized to generate a holistic perspective of the manager’s performance. Critical success factors include, but are not limited to:

• SLA conformance

• User satisfaction

• Staff feedback

• Executive presence

• Cost management

• Resource utilization

In larger organizations, managers may have greater autonomy to guide the activities of the service desk staff – resulting in greater influence over team performance. It is important that managers have a clear job charter and delegated authority for managing the service-desk function. This charter should include an outline of expected performance targets. The manager should be empowered to make necessary changes within their organization and operations to achieve performance targets.

In small organizations, managers are often hands-on resources, resolving tickets and addressing user requests. They are a doer first, and a manager second. Many small and medium businesses don’t have the resources or need for a large service desk. A small team of technical resources with a broad set of skills provides IT support. Each agent may have specialties, but everyone fields user requests and contributes to ticket resolution. In a small IT organization, the manager role is focused on:

• Technical skills needed to resolve complex issues

• Mentoring and training other service desk staff

• Major Incident management

In larger organizations, managers assume more of an overall coordination role. As service-desk operations expand, it is natural for individual agents and teams to become more specialized. This specialization often centers on specific technologies or layers of the technology stack, such as networking, desktop support, and user software. This specialization includes the need for defined workflows, business rules, and organizational structures. Managers often find themselves spending most of their time managing the activities of others and making sure processes are running smoothly—and spending less time working on end-user service requests. In larger organizations, the manager role is focused on:

• People management

• Ticket escalations

• Vendor management and engagement

• Shift handoffs

• Continuous-improvement initiatives

• Disaster-recovery and business-continuity planning

Should an SDM Handle Major Incident Management?

In small organizations, it is very common for the manager also to be the lead for major incident management. As the most senior technical resource in the service desk organization, the service desk manager often has more experience, business relationships, and coordination skills than others on the IT service desk team. In the absence of a designated major incident manager, the role of managing major incidents falls to the service desk manager.

In large organizations, it is both atypical and undesired for the manager also to be the major incident manager, although both managers will work very closely during a major incident. This is because, in large organizations, the coordination tasks for major incident management are often much larger, with more resources needed for diagnostics and troubleshooting and more stakeholders must be kept apprised of incident status. It is best to let the major incident manager coordinate the incident while the manager oversees continuous service-desk operations and minor incidents.

The manager will still be involved in major incidents (even if there is a separate major incident manager). They will typically be responsible for:

• Coordinating IT service desk and support team resources

• Monitoring system status and business impacts of the major incident

• Orchestrating user communications

• Triaging incoming support requests for related impacts

Major incidents are “all-hands-on-deck” situations for any IT department. There is typically significant business disruption or potential for catastrophic impact, and resolving the incident is the entire organization’s highest priority. During a major incident, other business activities don’t stop, however. There are other activities, service requests, changes, and incidents that must also be addressed to keep the business running and prevent other major incidents from occurring. A manager’s most important function during a major incident is to maintain control of all other issues, so the team working on the major incident can focus on resolving the big issue.

The Value of an IT Service Desk Manager

IT organizations are well aware of the great value of a skilled manager overseeing their service-desk staff and operations. The service desk is one of the most important functions in any IT organization and company leaders must have confidence in the person entrusted to manage service-desk operations. The manager is the single point of contact for other ITSM functions, providing a knowledgeable and influential participant in important IT projects and business events. They are the escalation contact for critical issues, able to engage with subject-matter experts throughout the company to minimize and contain impacts on business operations.

Every organization needs someone responsible for managing its service-desk operations. If your service desk is small (a few people), one of the senior agents may be able to serve as the manager while also resolving user requests. If your service desk has more than one shift, specialized teams, vendor relationships, or more than about 10 agents, then you probably need a dedicated manager focused on coordination and management activities.

Managers are essential to ensuring service-desk operations run smoothly, users receive the level of support they expect and the IT organization’s resources are utilized efficiently. The position is a combination of general (people) management, operations management, and special projects. Your manager must have the skillset, mindset, and experience to manage multiple, conflicting priorities in a high-stress environment. He or she must see both the big picture of operations as well as be able to be directly involved in user support.