Ticket management has become an essential part of IT service management over the last couple of decades. In all larger organisations, the days of a tap on the shoulder to solve a computer problem are long past.
The reasons why helpdesks came into existence, then became far more systemised, are obvious: businesses needed to know exactly the demands placed on their IT departments, to quantify and then solve the most common drains on staff time, to allocate the right people to the right tasks, and to measure effectiveness of response.
For smaller organisations who have reached this point, possibly having experienced a spell of rapid growth, it might be tricky to know where to look. So, we’ve put together what we think are the key considerations when looking at ticket management systems.
1. Easy to use
If you’re going to introduce a new helpdesk system, it shouldn’t be unnecessarily complicated. Clean, uncluttered UI is important for building internal trust in a new product. When one of your colleagues wants to do something, it should be very simple to do it. You’re trying to make your lives easier, not harder.
2. Copes with complexity
Some tickets are straightforward. Others, not so much. So you need a ticket management system that doesn’t limit how you can deal with the tricky ones. As more information comes to light from multiple stakeholders, that needs to be reflected in the ticket so that everyone always has the best information available.
3. Allows straightforward tracking
When you want a quick overview of tickets, sorted by status, owner or date, that needs to be the work of an instant. It should be extremely easy to identify how well you’re performing, and where the bottlenecks lie.
4. Easy to submit tickets
Ideally you have a strong environment whereby users don’t often need to get your help in fixing problems. But when incidents do occur, you don’t want your colleagues scrabbling around trying to get hold of you: that only leads to a bad reputation, which can be tricky to recover from. One of the best ways to achieve favourable helpdesk accessibility is to allow the submission of tickets from the Windows Notification Bar with a customisable popup.
5. Part of a unified solution
A proper helpdesk is one critical tool among many in an IT manager’s armoury. It makes logistical sense to include application management, Windows updates, OS deployment, inventory and analytics, security and remote control as part of the same solution.
