The holiday season is now over. The Christmas tree is dismantled. Shopping is completed. Vacation photos are shared. Boxes are unpacked. People, including IT staff, are now headed back to work for the New Year with hopes that the holidays won’t lead to a flood of issues coming their way. As the phones start ringing and emails begin to fly in, we’ve compiled a list of the four most common requests that come up in the first two weeks of the year. Furthermore, we’ve provided details as to how the IT helpdesk staff can deal with them.
1. Automating Password Resets
The most common issue related to the holiday hangover is users forgetting their passwords. It’s very common to see a big spike in password reset requests for the IT helpdesk in the first few weeks of the New Year. With industry estimates of $70 per password reset, the mundane and time-consuming password resets are something you can certainly live without early in the year. While there are self-service options available, users feel that the simplest option is to call the helpdesk. As a helpdesk technician, you must be able to politely direct users to automated password reset options if they are available in your organization. If those aren’t available, now is the time to start taking steps to keep IT service desk staff out of the password reset process, as much as possible.
2. Implementing Pending Changes
Many organizations put in effect a change freeze at the end of the year when modifications to IT systems and infrastructure are put on hold. The idea behind such a freeze is to maintain stability in the system during a period of busy business activity or reduced support coverage when any impact due to a change could be heightened. In the New Year, the focus shifts from change freeze to change management, which facilitates the implementation of pending changes. IT helpdesk staffs face pressure to bypass normal change management processes and there is usually a flurry of emergency changes requested during this period. Change managers should be careful to resist such pressure and ensure that the appropriate analysis, documentation, sign-offs and conflict checks are in place before scheduling changes for implementation.
3. Connecting Christmas Gadgets
The holiday season sends everybody on a shopping spree for technological gadgets, which results in a large influx of personal devices plugged into the corporate network when users get back to work. While helpdesk team members wrestle with increased consumption of network bandwidth, they simultaneously get requests from users to get these devices connected to the company network in order to access other resources. In the absence of a defined BYOD policy, IT helpdesks can get overwhelmed with these requests. Thus, it is a wise idea for you to draw up such a policy this year. Your company may also have to add to their existing IT inventory around the end of the year. As a result, you would be responsible for the onboarding process for these new assets. Having an asset management solution automates the majority of this activity, but this is still something that would demand attention in the first few weeks.
4. Managing Employee Access
The end of the year is a time for seasonal hiring and once the holiday season is over, it is time for offboarding. IT helpdesk teams are tasked with cancelling network access, clearing passwords, verifying that email and applications are terminated and computer drives are cleaned. Managing employee access involves different teams and can be cumbersome if it is not carried out as a structured activity. The New Year is also the time when interviews pick up pace and job offers are handed out resulting in the onboarding process of new employees. With tools like Service Catalog, IT teams can effectively handle this transition with published SLAs and defined task owners, which reduces the hassle for everybody involved.
When you deal with all of this and more, there’s nothing better than a rock solid IT helpdesk application standing by your side. We recommend that you check out ManageEngine’s ServiceDesk Plus. Available On-Premise and On-Cloud , this award winning, ITIL ready software can get you off to that flying start this New year!
We wish you a very happy 2014!
