Unplanned work (things you didn\u2019t know you needed to do when you started your day) gets in the way of planned work (things you should be doing). This is why most people end the day thinking \u201cI didn\u2019t get as many things done as I thought I would today\u201d. That\u2019s because of unplanned work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The service desk<\/a> is no different. Unplanned work steals time from the day. Sometimes it\u2019s a catch-22 situation: A stream of incident calls about a certain issue get in the way of the planned work to solve that issue once and for all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The question is this: What can you do about it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first step is to work out what \u201cit<\/em>\u201d is. What types of unplanned work are getting in the way? How frequent are they? Which are the biggest problem here? You need visibility of the volume of different issues, requests and inquiries that come into the service desk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then you can think about what\u2019s causing this unplanned work, and how you can prevent or divert it. This is where you begin to turn a corner from being a reactive<\/em> service desk to be a proactive<\/em> service desk. Unplanned work makes you reactive. Planned work makes you proactive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With each type of unplanned<\/em> work as a trigger, you are planning<\/em> work to eliminate the unplanned work. One job done now means many jobs don\u2019t need to be done later. This isn\u2019t new. The phrase \u201ca stitch in time saves nine\u201d<\/em> is 300 years old.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once you have a handle on the types and volume of break-fix work which is tying up your service desk, you will be able to prioritize and analyse the various challenges. The blend of issues flowing into each service desk will be different, but there are a number of proven solutions which can be easily matched up to the challenges:<\/p>\n\n\n\n These are just two very high-level examples of unplanned work and the strategies to deal with them. You will need to identify and analyse the types of unplanned work that are getting in the way of your<\/em> service desk\u2014<\/em>which will require some simple reporting to show your most frequent call categories ranked by volume per month. This will give you the insight you need on where to focus attention first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By eliminating a chunk of unplanned work, the service desk can reclaim a surprising amount of time for service improvement initiatives, training, ITSM toolset<\/a> implementation work, knowledge capture, and contributing to IT projects which push the organization\u2019s digital agenda forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n