A Catalogue Is Born At the start 2016, the Library and IT “catalogue” was an A-Z with 159 “services”. They were not all services. A management spreadsheet had reduced this list to 108 candidate entries. Clearly everyone and everything was declaring “I’m a service”. Of course, people will shout “But we did have a catalogue!”. […]

‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’  George Santayana Life of Reason, Reason in Common Sense, Scribner’s, 1905, page 284   People ask for dashboards and reports to show what has happened. Ideally we would see what is probably going to happen.  In the September 2020 blog “Do We Know What […]

This time last year the blog post I Know What You Did Last September looked at 2018 data and made predictions for September 2019. At that point I was confident that the September 2019 data would inform the September 2020 data… but back in March the world was turned upside down. As an aside, when such calamitous […]

It is July 2020. Everyone is trying to make do amidst loss and anxiety; or frustration and impatience. The economic reality is kicking in and budget holders are being told to tighten their purse strings. If you were short staffed, or if staff have left, recruiting to replace is unlikely to be an option. And […]

Heuristics are the cognitive short-cuts we employ during decision making. Heuristic traps are when those heuristic short cuts lead to undesirable outcomes which in hindsight seem hard to explain… logically. Before continuing it is worth emphasizing that heuristics are useful in the right contexts. They allow us to not waste valuable thought processes over trivial […]

Which is more important? The User? Or the Queue? A fallout from doing service management reporting is a greater appreciation of the perspectives of good service. However what good service looks like is subjective. Recently the team had a discussion about that classic service desk tension situation – the queue. The discussion was animated… and […]

Every organisation will have something that appears to be straightforward but somehow they make a mess of it! And what is more frustrating is that it is easy to articulate the problem yet the solution is far more complex. Often these seemingly straightforward issues have the characteristic of being an event that may be anticipated […]

In 1996, a PhD supervisor was in New Zealand on sabbatical and so guidance seemed impossible. Yet my email request for feedback, sent from Edinburgh, received a reply within under 5 minutes. This post is not a rant about email. Instead it probes the default assumption that service desks need to support email as a […]

Spring Is Just Around The Corner… Whilst cycling in this morning there was still snow on the hills but also signs of spring just around the corner… In nature spring is a time of rapid change and this change is often cruel and time bound. The crocuses in the picture are in a race against […]

Everyone deals with problems but not everyone can measure how well they deal with problems. To measure you need a clear, shared Problem Management process. If using a dedicated Problem Management function is new to you then the first challenge is identifying all the problems and known errors. Some problems will be well known – […]