service-desk

# Service desk The service desk is where the whole IT organization is judged, usually by people having a bad day. Most of what makes it good is intake discipline and honest measurement. ## Intake determines everything downstream Capture enough at first contact to route correctly and act without a second exchange: who, what they were doing, what happened, what they expected, and how blocked they are. Give the requester a single channel that works. Multiple half-supported channels — a queue, a chat, a shoulder tap, a manager's direct message — mean the loudest request wins rather than the most urgent, and the desk's workload becomes unmeasurable because most of it is invisible. ## Priority is impact against urgency Priority is not a feeling. Define it on two axes — how many people are affected and how blocked they are — and publish the matrix so it can be applied consistently rather than argued each time. Keep **incidents** (something broken) separate from **requests** (something wanted). They have different clocks, different queues, and different success conditions, and merging them lets routine requests bury outages. Escalation should be time-based and automatic. Relying on someone to notice a ticket aging means the tickets that age are the ones nobody is watching. ## Measure service, not activity Tickets closed measures activity, and optimizing it produces premature closure and reopened tickets. Better: - **First-contact resolution** — resolved without a handoff. ...