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Large-Scale Deployment of a High-Performance Help Desk Application January 1995 Cover Story Early in 1993, the Atlanta-based Southern Company faced a situation that has recently confronted management everywhere. Rapid adoption of new technologies over the past decade meant that the modern organization needed a quality support process that could efficiently expand and upgrade high-tech systems and keep "down time" to a minimum. The Southern Company, an electric utility holding company that is the parent of Georgia Power and five other power firms in four states, presented a classic case. Over the years, the company had seen departments in its subsidiaries modernize with advances in telecommunications and computing technology. At the same time, it had watched the accompanying evolution of regional service centers dedicated to supporting the newly introduced products. While these homegrown efforts were often effective, it was obvious that the whole support effort could be streamlined and made more efficient. Georgia Power, for example, had its information services department supporting a statewide communications and computing network encompassing 11,000 employees. Distributed across Georgia, this workforce was assisted by nearly 200 technicians assigned to eight regional centers whose response systems were increasingly strained by more calls about more products involving newer and newer generations of technology. Isolated islands of activity, these centers suffered from an inability to share information about solutions generated in other parts of the state. Efficiency was also limited in a number of other ways: Support centers often had difficulty establishing communications with technicians in the field. Warranty and service contract information was not readily available. And management often found itself frustrated by the difficulty of generating comprehensive reports that would reveal trends and identify areas in need of improvement. Steps Toward an Enterprise-Wide Solution Seeking to upgrade support capabilities by means of an enterprise-wide solution, Southern Company Services Inc., which oversees the Southern Company’s information systems, encouraged Georgia Power to take the lead in streamlining help desk operations. Georgia Power’s task was to create a centralized help desk using advanced automation software. If Georgia Power’s installation proved successful, it would be adopted by its sister entities across the enterprise. Organizations turning to automated systems have three options: they can buy a software package off the shelf; they can build their own system; or they can find a software house to help them develop a custom application. A project team created by Georgia Power quickly discovered that neither of the first two options was feasible. While many software products were available, none had all of the functionalities required by Georgia Power and its sister firms. A custom solution was needed–but the company’s information systems staff could not be diverted to such a long-term project. Consequently, the team set out to locate a suitable software house. After meeting with a number of candidates, Georgia Power turned to Transnational Computer Technology (TCT), an El Segundo, CA-based software and consulting firm that specializes in creating applications for service, support, and remanufacturing. TCT was asked to work with the Georgia Power team in developing a state-of-the-art help-desk system tailored to the specific needs of Georgia Power but flexible enough to be adapted to the various requirements of its sister firms. An automated help desk promises to provide an organization with obvious benefits: a simple and consistent support procedure, call tracking, problem-solving capability, quick access to relevant product data, efficient scheduling of technicians, elimination of most paperwork, and easy generation of useful reports. However, impressive as these and other benefits may sound, a new help desk will not deliver maximum value unless its operation is carefully integrated into the specific working environment of an organization. Three Types of Needs A project team developing an enterprise-wide help desk must begin by listening to people within the organization to discover the precise needs the new system is expected to meet. This set of fundamental requirements may be more easily identified and segmented by seeking answers to the following questions: • What do the callers need? • What do the technicians need? • What does management need? Typical callers, or "customers," like to follow a clear and simple procedure that seems geared to serving them. They want a single point of contact, quick access to an operator’s voice, and knowledgeable assistance with their situation. If the issue cannot be resolved during the call, they want to know when a field technician will arrive and how long it will take to finish the job. Finally, callers need an easy way to check on the progress of their ticket. This capability allows people to see that the system is responding and lets them know how much longer they must wait until their situation is resolved. When an organization is changing to a new support system, it must begin by examining the strengths and weaknesses of the process being replaced. People who have relied on the old process over some time are able to provide revealing examples of what works well and what frustrates them. Information gathered from such employees helps designers build upon successful procedures already familiar to callers and makes the transition to the new help desk much less confusing and disruptive. Technicians Technicians tend to be wary when management proposes a new and improved way of doing a job. From their point of view, changes mean the disruption of established routines and the imposition of procedures devised by outsiders with no "hands-on" knowledge of what the work is like. Sensitive to such views, Georgia Power made sure that technicians’ voices would be heard. From the start, the help-desk project team included representatives from each of the firm’s eight service centers. Input from these groups ultimately made acceptance easier because each group had established pride of ownership in the project. Equally important, of course, was establishing a clear sense of the technicians’ practical needs and priorities. The Georgia Power technicians emphasized, for example, that they were not typists and wanted to capture the maximum amount of information with a minimum number of key strokes and mouse clicks. Technicians’ supervisors also insisted on functional simplicity: a user-friendly product would mean less time spent on training. The technician’s list of desired functionalities included an automatic pager interface, laptop access to the system, and other features that could facilitate scheduling and ease communications with personnel working in the field. Committed to creating a system that would measurably increase work efficiency, the Georgia Power-TCT team built a prototype that ran on a PC. As each portion of the software was amplified, experienced technicians tested the prototype, thereby providing direct confirmation of the interface between the user and the system. Appraising job-related practicality and ease of use in this manner, the project team kept fine tuning the application until technicians’ representatives were more than satisfied. Management For its part, management wanted a system that would easily integrate into Southern Company’s sophisticated computing environment. Requirements for the new help desk therefore called for a client/server technology using products preferred by the organization: a SQL Windows client application on a Windows PC work station along with an ORACLE relational database server. To identify areas for improvement and for assistance in planning and budgeting the support function, management must have a reliable way of measuring service. A relational data base answers this need by providing easy access to information about response times, call back requirements, common problem types, resolution statistics, and so on. Drawing on such measurements, an application that generates custom reports helps management evaluate performance by region, by product, by season–by whatever categories are most useful. Such reports reveal trends and provide early warnings about problem areas. To Georgia Power’s management it was imperative that the new centralized help desk include a flexible reporting tool that would allow for necessary levels of analysis. Installation In December 1993, less than a year after the project team was formed, the new application–now named Resolve–was completed. Installation began in a test-bed environment: at first, only one service region was converted and the new application ran at that location during a shakedown period that confirmed consistent, reliable operation and highly positive acceptance by the user community. Finally, in March of 1994, Resolve was installed across Georgia Power. By adopting the new system, Georgia Power had dramatically transformed its support environment. Eight regional service centers had merged into a unified help desk with a single point of contact: one phone number served callers from anywhere in the state. The separated service centers that had been unable to talk with one another were now part of a centralized system in which everyone could share knowledge about solutions and no longer had to keep reinventing the wheel. Assisted by a research module continually updated with captured information about failures and repair histories, help desk operators were able to pinpoint callers’ problems more quickly and resolve a higher percentage of calls over the phone. At the same time, supervisors found it easier to schedule efficiently. The addition of Resolve’s scheduling-system module and ticket-splitting capability helped route assignments to appropriate and available personnel. The pager interface, especially useful in situations needing priority attention, automatically notified technicians of expedited calls and assured quick response. In addition, a product inventory module that gives instant access to warranty provisions and service contracts allowed operators and supervisors to take full advantage of agreements with manufacturers and third-party service providers. Because the new system was developed with technicians’ actual work needs in mind, training did not take much time: one-day sessions were the norm. Learning the new system easily in the classroom, technicians also found that it eased work in the field. Cumbersome paper and pen methods for recording and saving information had been replaced by quick means of electronic entry. Scheduling instructions appeared automatically on users’ screens. In a matter of weeks, the habit of looking at PCs or laptops to check regularly updated "to do" lists had become a standard part of the technician’s job–a routine comparable to checking one’s voice mail. Finally, whenever users wished to offer input about how Resolve might be made even more responsive to workplace needs, they were able to turn to a special "help desk for help desk" ticket and enter suggestions. This direct input has been reviewed regularly by systems administrators and by Resolve’s Product Manager at TCT, Ravi Kumar, to determine which suggestions need most attention. Usually, improving the situation involves little more than making small adjustments in procedures; at other times, it can lead to the addition of new functionalities in later versions of the system. Benefits Surveys of Georgia Power callers show that they find the centralized system much more responsive than the regional processes it replaced. Key benefits include reduced "down time" and timely responses to requests for upgrading or expanding equipment. Callers also respond favorably to their new ability to check the status of their support requests. They can do so easily, at any time, even when away from their usual work areas, by using any PC in the firm. Such positive reactions from callers are vital because increased workforce satisfaction is the most obvious measure of a new help desk’s success. Management, which previously lacked sufficient information about support performance, is now able to monitor abundant data about which kinds of calls are most common and about how various issues are resolved. First-level resolution rates, for example, have exceeded 60 percent, and trends indicate they are climbing toward management’s goal of 80 percent. Trend tracking of such performance factors, impossible only a year earlier, allows management to be more proactive in making the adjustments needed to maintain high levels of employee satisfaction.
Enterprise-Wide Deployment In late summer of 1994, after six months of supporting help desk operations in Georgia Power, Resolve had shown itself capable of handling the needs of a large and complex organization. Having observed the system’s success first hand, Georgia Power’s sister entities now asked that it be made available to them. Installation across the enterprise began in September, proceeding by stages into Alabama Power, Mississippi Power, Gulf Power, Savannah Electric and Power, Southern Nuclear Services, and Southern Company Services.
By now, TCT was marketing Resolve as an off-the-shelf product flexible enough to be easily modified for new clients. In the case of Georgia Power’s sister companies, such modifications were made in relatively short time not only because of general similarities in support operations but also because their requirements had been considered during the original research and testing conducted by the Georgia Power-TCT project team. Again, as in the case of Georgia Power, technicians needed only one-day training periods and the whole process of preparation and deployment into six large organizations was completed in less than four months. At the end of the year, the new help desk application was running throughout the Southern Company’s multi-state information network whose 350 servers connect the operations of subsidiaries throughout Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi. One of the largest deployments of help-desk software in the world, Resolve supports a workforce of 35,000 and schedules nearly 1,000 technicians. The system’s two connected telephone centers, one in Atlanta and one in Birmingham, are expected to handle calls at a rate of about 250,000 per year. Faced with the need to streamline support for high-tech equipment and software, the Southern Company responded by seeking a high-tech solution. Although the cost-efficiency of large-scale automated systems is sometimes questioned by skeptics, the Southern Company’s example shows how to make such installations pay off. The parent organization and its subsidiaries did not simply jump to automation, hoping for a quick cure. Their well-managed, step-by-step approach produced a high-performance help desk that has already proved itself very reliable–and that receives high marks from callers, technicians, and managers alike.
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