The starting point for helping the team was not to focus on what was not working but focus on what was. The team had a good grasp of who was responsible for what types of requests and had a strong attitude of wanting to go as much as they can for internal customers. This was a strong starting point: a good culture. We worked with the team to enhance this with strong systems and processes.

Firstly, we rationalised the categories used for handling request by aligning the request types to the natural deliniation of responsiblity that existed in the team. The goal was to favour ease-of-use over too much granularity and categorisation.

We then worked through the team’s business processses, and developed a consistent process that could be used across all types of requests. This made it straightforward to understand where each request was up to, easier to pass between team members, and for the team to know what they were expected to do next. To keep processes working effectively, the team instigated bi-weekly check-ins to manage open requests. This provided a natural mechanism to manage workload and prevent the backlog of requets from getting out of hand. It also provided a regular opportunity for escelating requests that needed management input.

To give better visiability of requests a central system for managing requests was required. The organisation already used JIRA Software to manage testing and bug tracking and so we helped them to extend this to adopt JIRA Service Desk, including implementing an internal knowledge base articles in Jira Confluence. Importantly, we encouraged the team to use the new tools as a learning portal rather than a help portal. For each request received, we encouraged them to detect if there is a gap in understanding that was leading to the request and publish more knowledge base articles.