Imagine trying to coach a baseball team that doesn’t know the rules of the game.
You can have all the expertise and the best training tech on the market.
But if your people don’t know how to use it, it’ll all be for nothing.
That’s essentially what happens when IT departments implement a new service desk ticketing system without an effective deployment process.
Employees get confused; techs get frustrated; and all the time and effort you went to choosing the most impactful integrations goes to waste.
A smooth deployment process mitigates these problems, ensuring your teams have the knowledge, skills and motivation to make the most of DeskDirector.
Here are 6 steps you can take to ensure you achieve exactly that:
Start by outlining exactly what the deployment process should achieve.
For some organizations, this will involve a lot of employee education; for others, it will be about increasing usage or consolidating and replacing systems. Assess your current ticketing system, how your organization uses it - and how you’d ultimately like the system to operate.
This should leave you with a clear “map” for the deployment process, with a “starting point” and an “end point”.
But it’s important to be open to change. You may realize, upon assessing your existing system, that the only way to ensure employees actually use tickets is if you place the ticketing system inside their existing Microsoft environment.
This would entail opting for a solution like DeskDirector, which integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Teams and Sharepoint.
2.Build a team
Once you have a plan of action, you need a team to make it a reality.
Who are the individuals or teams that will be responsible for setting up the new system? Who will take charge of the migration? Who will train people on the new system?
Accountability is vital to an effective deployment process, so make sure everybody in your team understands and accepts their role.
This will be helped by putting key performance metrics into place…
Measurement is a key driver of performance, and you need to determine ahead of time how success will be defined.
Choose a few key metrics, such as employee usage after <x> number of months or number of successfully resolved tickets per day.
These will give you a reasonably clear overview of how well the organization has adopted the new service desk ticketing system.
These metrics will also help you align your teams around a shared goal and incentives.
You can define each individual’s responsibilities or tasks as they relate to the ultimate measure.
For example, if a tech is in charge of teaching HR how to use the new ticketing system and service desk tools, you can measure their performance by how many tickets H&R produces within the first month.
Each sub-task within the deployment process needs to have a clear timeline.
When will you complete migration?
When will you officially cut off your old solution?
And how will you allow users to get used to the new ticket system?
Not only do clear timelines help for planning and creating urgency; they also help you measure your team’s performance.
However, it is important to build “Grace periods” in, as there are often complications when introducing an entire new software system.
Even intuitive service desk tools like DeskDirector require a certain degree of end-user education.
Each department needs to understand how they can log tickets; how the priority system works; what to do if their ticket is not being handled quickly enough; and what does and does not warrant a ticket in the first place.
Given that more than half of all high-growth service teams are “reliant” on help desk software,1 it's important that end-users know this stuff.
You need a clear education and training process: this might involve developing documentation which they can refer to, but you should also have techs speak directly to each team, as this encourages trust in the new ticketing system.
Ticketing automation can transform the efficiency of your IT department, ensuring tickets move smoothly through the pipeline and issues are resolved more quickly.
In fact, almost 74% of IT and engineering leaders say process automation has helped their workforce save at least 11-30% of the time previously spent on manual processes.2
However, automation doesn’t happen overnight, and shouldn't be taken lightly.
You need to consider where automation will help your specific organization, which processes should be automated, and how you’ll achieve this.
Consider starting with this blog which explores 5 key processes which can be automated using DeskDirector software.
DeskDirector is designed to make improving your ticketing system easy and intuitive.
Our all-in-one software helps you make the most of workflow automation, integrate ticketing into the Microsoft environment, resolve tickets 4x faster and increase end-user satisfaction by 20%.
Want to see how?