Explore how the support center’s strategy drives everything the support center does: service delivery, infrastructure implementation, operational processes, workforce management, and support center marketing. This course helps support center managers satisfy operational demands and build a support center that aligns with the organization, adds value to the business, and delivers on its commitments.

What You Will Learn

• Five characteristic of an effective support center manager
• How to create Service Level Agreements (SLAs), Operating Level Agreements (OLAs),and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) in support of a service catalog
• Steps to cost-benefit analysis, total cost of ownership, and calculating Return on Investment (ROI)
• The difference between and importance of strategic, tactical, and operational planning
• Benefits and challenges of self-service technologies
• The metrics, benchmarks, and KPIs essential to your performance reporting

Katherine Lord, HDI Faculty Member

Katherine spent much of her career managing IT support functions in Canada and the US and specialized in turning “help-less desks” into value-added entities with improved business focus, renewed vision, and customer-centric fundamentals. She brings her classrooms to life with real world examples and provides invaluable insight into benchmarking, gap assessments, and process improvement.

This course focuses on the development and execution of strategic plans that will take the organization to the next level. You will learn how to realize greater Return on Investments (ROI), develop and maintain formal procedures for increased productivity and consistency, and manage customer perceptions.

What You Will Learn

• How to quantify your support center’s value, calculate and maximize Return on Investment (ROI) Twelve step process and decision matrix for selecting technologies and vendors
• How to align support strategies with business goals and objectives
• Strategies for workforce management, coaching, team building and succession planning
• How to justify a service improvement project with a business case
• SMART methods for determining which quantitative and qualitative metrics are utilized
• Valuable reporting tools: Balanced Scorecard, Morning Report, and Executive Brief

This course outlines a set of practical steps for capturing, storing, and successfully reusing knowledge. Participants will learn how to implement a strategy adopting Knowledge-Centered SupportSM (KCS) which creates and maintains knowledge as a by-product of the incident management process. Implementing KCS helps significantly improve service levels to customers, gain operational efficiencies, and increase the organization’s value to the company.

What You Will Learn

• How to efficiently create and maintain quality, easy-to-find content in the knowledge base
• Ways to motivate support analysts to use the knowledge base and to effectively assess individual and team contributions
• How to articulate the value of knowledge management practices for your organization
• A strategy for sustainable success that minimizes investments in knowledge workflow and maximizes the return
• How to identify and avoid the common pitfalls associated with knowledge management
• Actionable steps to improve time-to-resolve and reduce expenses

John Custy, HDI Faculty Member

John has 20+ years experience in developing and implementing IT services management solutions. He assists organizations in developing their service strategies and translating those strategies into functional business plans, resulting in improved IT services management practices. John is an ITIL-certified service manager and also holds ITIL Practitioner certifications in IT service management.