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Ask our Expert
With Ivanka Menken
Q
A
What skills do I look for in
Help Desk staff?
Page 14
Page 15
First of all, this article is not to be considered as
an extensive statement, as it needs to be generic
enough to suit any reader for any organization.
However, it will be a great reminder of the key topics
that need to be considered.
Besides customer service and telephony skills being
obviously connected with single point of contact, the
remaining skills are typically connected to the Help Desk
Analyst’s training and experience with specific products,
hardware and software, and technologies.
The level and focus of skills is dependent on the general
purpose of the Help Desk. An expert Help Desk must
have greater skills than a skilled Help Desk, but will
typically specialize in a specific area, rather than having
broad knowledge over many IT subjects.
TheSkills Framework for the InformationAge (SFIA, www.
sfia.org.uk) provides a good foundation for determining
the appropriate skill level necessary for each type of Help
Desk. The SFIA provides a management tool useful for
determining how to use or develop the skills required for
IT. The tool does not explicitly focus on specific skills for
an IT area, since the necessary skills for an IT department
can vary greatly, but provides a means of assessing the
application of those skills by IT personnel.
Skills Framework for the Information Age
TheSFIAmanagement tool provides apractical approach
to determining the appropriate skill sets required by
many areas of IT, including:
• Strategy and architecture
• Business change
• Solution development and implementation
• Service management
• Procurement and management support
• Client interface
Our focus is on Service Desk, and Incident Management
is categorized under Service Management/Service
Operation of the framework.
However, before we get into specifics about these IT
areas, one should be introduced to SFIA concepts first,
namely:
• Skills Context
“ITIL® is a Registered Trade Mark of the Cabinet Office”.
• Description of Responsibilities
• Skills Management Cycle
Skills Context
The skills context is a means of describing a job skill
through professional, behavioral, and knowledge
requirements. These requirements can be compared
against a person’s experience and qualifications to
determine if the job and the person are a good fit.
SFIA identifies nearly 100 fundamental IT skills, with
Service Desk and Incident Management being just
one IT skill. The description of this skill within the skills
context is:
Professional Skills
– Person must process and
coordinate responses to incident requests appropriately
and in a timely fashion, including escalating requests
to appropriate support groups, monitoring all activities
toward resolution, and notifying end users of any status
updates up to and including closure of the incident
report.
Behavior Skills
– The level of responsibility can
range from Help Desk personnel depending on the
job description. The recognized levels of Help Desk
personnel are level 1 to level 5 (more about these levels
in the next section, Description of Responsibilities).
Knowledge
– This describes the technologies, products,
internal systems, services, processes, methods, and
certifications expected from each person and is different
for each implementation.
Description of Responsibilities
Each generic skill, such as Service Desk and Incident
Management, can fall into one or more levels of
responsibility. The SFIA recognizes seven levels of
responsibility (in ascending order):
1. Follow
2. Assist
3. Apply
4. Enable
5. Ensure/Advise
6. Initiate/Influence
7. Set Strategy, Inspire, Mobilize
The intention of these different levels is to
allow service organizations to define the core
competencies of its required skill set. Each
level of responsibility is described in terms of:
Autonomy
– the level of dependency or self-motivation
expected from a person, as well as the given authority
or responsibility to an assigned IT area. A person with a
higher level of responsibility will have greater autonomy,
while the lowest level will be supervised and directed in
their actions.
Influence
–describes the scopeand rangeof theperson’s
influence. Persons at the lowest level of responsibility
may influence persons immediately surrounding them,
while higher levels have the potential to influence the
entire organization and even the IT industry itself.
Complexity
– describes the type of work performed by
the person in generic terms. A person at lower levels of
responsibilitywill performmore routine tasks whichmay
have clear guidelines for execution. As a result, the tasks
are not considered complex. Higher levels will need to
make decisions regarding how they proceed toward a
specific goal and will require a deeper understanding of
the key factors in order to make the right decisions.
Business Skills
– focus on the types of generic skills
required at each level for responsibility. For instance,
level 7 personnel will apply skills related to strategy,
management, and leadership, whereas level 1 personnel
will apply skills related to information systems,
technologies, processes, and applications.
You need 28/40 to pass.
This means that if the answers are based on a 5/3/1/0 scale,
you really cannot afford to get any 0 score for an answer.
You must get at least 2 x 5 mark answers and the remaining
averaging 3s (to get minimum of 28).
YOU NEED TO KNOWYOUR STUFF!