it help desk roles and responsibilities

 ROLES AND THEIR DEFINITION

ITIL establishes that a role is a set of responsibilities and authorities that are conferred on one or more individuals to interact with other assets and offer a comprehensive service. To correctly define a role, we must assign it:

A title that distinguishes it from others.

Responsibilities that focus their efforts on specific results of a service or process.

Authority, conferred to enable the fulfillment of assigned responsibilities.

It is important that the assignment of responsibilities and authorities is done correctly to promote success in the activities of a given role. There are two possible scenarios when these elements are not adequately combined it help desk roles and responsibilities:

The authority exceeds the responsibility: In this case the authority is wasted because even if the organization confers the necessary elements (hierarchical or otherwise) to carry out actions, if they are not part of its responsibility, the authority simply cannot be used effectively. Worse still, we fall into the risk of the role intervening in matters that are not relevant to its objectives, falling into distractions.

Responsibility exceeds authority: This is the riskiest and sadly most common scenario in organizations. Responsibilities greater than authority are assigned to roles, setting objectives that they simply are not able to fulfill because they do not have the necessary elements.

Read: 5 IT Strategies to Generate Business Value

In the example I described at the beginning of the article, the Service Desk Manager had the goal of aligning the IT organization to better service provisioning practices. However, it lacked the authority to take action to accomplish that goal. Authority is expressed through role capabilities within the organization. These capacities must be recognized by the rest of the colleagues to be able to assign the appropriate importance. In an extreme case, the Service Desk ManagerIt should have had the necessary authority to take actions (warning or otherwise) on the rest of the personnel that did not follow the best practices. Lacking this power, the rest of the organization naturally did not recognize the importance of strategy or the manager's perception.

BEYOND DEFINITION

Once the roles are defined (with their appropriate responsibilities and authorities), it is necessary that the roles are managed correctly. That is, there must be appropriate mechanisms to determine what roles the organization needs and what kind of knowledge they must have to carry out their tasks properly as well as measure their performance.

Staff training must be strictly aligned with their activities within the organization. Insufficient training produces personnel without the necessary knowledge to carry out their tasks in the best way. Exaggerated training affects the organization through distractions and higher costs.

During our webinar, we will explore more details about defining and properly managing roles as well as ways to motivate staff and perform at their best.