The complete "best practices" guide to IT problem resolution!

No matter how professional your IT organization, if you can't resolve problems quickly and effectively, you'll lose your stakeholders' confidence—and fail. Nowadays, help desk s aren't enough: companies want true service centers capable of delivering complex, strategic solutions. IT Problem Management is the first single source for building world-class problem management processes. Drawing upon his extensive consulting e xperience, Gary Walker presents specific improvements you can make to achieve breakthrough results in any help desk or service center—in-house or out-sourced. Coverage includes:

• Problem identification, customer validation, problem lo gging, service delivery, knowledge capture and sharing, and management oversight

• The Immediate Response Model: accounting for problem variability, complexity, and volume

• Detailed metrics for measuring your responsiveness

• Bett er ways to create and use service level agreements

• State-of-the-art tools for customer interaction, service delivery, and proactive monitoring

• New Internet and knowledge base systems: empowering users to solve their own problems

• The human side: staffing, retention, and motivation

IT Problem Management isn't just theory: it delivers real-world case studies, detailed benchmarks, and practical solutions for turning your help desk into a high-performance I T service center, starting today.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 7 Ratings

Complete Guide to Service Center Processes - 2001-04-30
Reviewer Rating:
This is a great book for anyone involved in help desk or service center activities. I recommend this book for all IT professionals involved with production systems or anyone interested in IT methodology. This book gives the reader an appreciation for the documented processes and documentation that must be in place for a successful help desk venture.

This book has process flows for the entire problem management arena complete with guidelines on how to pick the most successful strategy for your company. It helps you with the decision process by offering pros and cons for each strategy so that you can tailor the strategy for your own goals and objectives. Also present are strategies for escalating problems and the structure that must be in place to support the strategy.

Other strong points of this book include the detail provided concerning the problem prioritization process, documented Triage processes, and escalation procedures. It also covers the documentation that must exist in order for a help desk to strive for cost effectiveness while meeting the goals of its customers.

This books helps IT professionals in the decision making process, whether you are currently involved in help desk activities, preparing to start a help desk, or migrating your current help desk into a service center. I gave this book to our help desk and they quickly ordered a couple of copies for the other managers. This is truly a first rate narrative.

good content - badly written - 2001-09-10
Reviewer Rating:
The content of the book is obviously interesting for people starting a help desk or any IT service department. I would just like to stress that it is badly written. Typical I-don't-have-much-to-say-but-I-will-say-it-in-200-pages syndrom. Example? p36 "Problem can be discovered either before or after they occur" Waow, that's information! p35 "Problem identification is simply the processes, methods, and tools used by the service center to indentify a problem". Hey M Walker, never learnt one should not use a word in its own definition?
What's more the book isn't much instructive. Example? It is said that one can use the "queuing theory" the anticipate resource needs but don't expect the book to explain what this theory is.

Not about Problem Management! - 2006-11-11
Reviewer Rating:
This is a decent overview of incident management and the processes that go along with the basic running of a Service Center. However, it is by no means about Problem Management as defined by the ITIL framework from which it takes its name! I was astounded to find the book not even distinguish between general help desk functions or workflow and Problem Management. While the book had some good perspective (especially the preface) on the Service Center development from basic help desk to a full-fledge customer support center-- and had some nice overviews and flow charts to illustrate different processes-- this book is not about Problem Management and root cause inquiry at all. While the writing is not great, it's not as bad as others here have portrayed. It does read like a freshman college textbook, which definitely took me aback, and there are points where the author elaborates on points over an entire page that could have been left to a paragraph, but overall the writing is at least straightforward and clear, avoiding hyper-complex sentence structure as I have exemplified in this review. ;-) This book is a decent beginner's overview of incident management and worthwhile reading to those looking for more formal processes, call incident flow charts or are starting a help desk from scratch.

Old handouts - 2007-05-15
Reviewer Rating:
This book appears to be a compilation of some handouts provided during a course or seminar.

I hope there is a better book available.

Very good book for problem solving... - 2006-11-13
Reviewer Rating:
I am currently working with returns and customer complains, this book helped me to lay out the problem solving procedures, flow charts and documentation. I would recomment to the people who are seeking solutions for IT or other problems.

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