by Gina Headden Until recently, ITIL hovered at the edge of my known universe. Imagine my surprise, when on secondment to the team, I discovered that ITIL plays a crucial role in the University. Like the sun in our solar system, it’s central to maintaining order in what might otherwise be chaos – whether we’re […]

Hello, remember us? ITIL Tattle? We’ve been gone for a while and during that time Autumn has well and truly arrived. We’re now all adjusted to the new world and ways of working, our students are back studying and we’ve achieved a lot of great things since James last blogged back in September. In his last […]

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 […]

Over the last  few weeks the ITIL Team have been talking a lot more about Second Line Support, we’ve been blogging about it, talking about it and James has even created a video about

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 […]

Service desks exist on a spectrum from call logging to expert, and the University has the full range of service desks currently. However, what are the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches?  Where is the best place to position your service desk? Let’s describe the two extremes ends of the spectrum initially. Call Logging This […]

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 […]

A few weeks’ ago, I asked the question, “Is our knowledge management best practice?“, although I left the answer as an exercise for the reader… If you thought that our current practice could do with improving, but didn’t know where to start, I’m going to propose an alternative operational approach, drawn from Knowledge-Centered Service, some […]

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 […]

A Look Back This week the blog is a celebration of how far we have come on our ITIL® journey. Sometimes it has been a winding uphill road but perhaps blue sky is ahead… It might seem an odd time to reflect but as the University has just passed through arguably the busiest time of […]