British anthropologist Robin Dunbar discovered a correlation between brain size and average group size. The main idea being that human’s are capable of holding around 150 relationships (actual findings range between 100-250) at any given time. Now before you jump ahead to help desks, workflows and all that good stuff on Microsoft Teams, let’s dive deeper into why this is important and what’s to gain.
Similarly in the business world, as organizations increase in size, it becomes increasing difficult to know everyone and remember every department process – this can be referred to as growing pains or scaling pains. As we talked to high growth startups, SMBs, mid-market and small enterprise, the trend was clear. Organizational processes begin to break-down and become inefficient at 50 full time employees (FTEs) and if clear processes have not been set, organizational velocity starts to drastically suffer at 100 FTEs.
For companies who have reached 150 to 1,000 FTEs, there are incredible productivity efficiencies to be gained by implementing processes that use workflow automation to assist with your internal requests.
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Help desks, Service desks, Ticketing, Workflows: What’s the difference?
The entire ecosystem of IT Service Management (ITSM) is highly developed and continues to evolve as IT’s role continues to play a bigger part in organization’s day-to-day success. For the purposes of this blog, we are going to summarize a few key points:
Help Desks: typically limited to a narrow scope of the ITSM process. Help desks main roles are to assist with incidents or the ‘break-fix’ process. We find it helpful to think in the simplest terms: something goes wrong, so a ticket or request is created and someone is then inserted into the process to help restore the problem back to it’s normal state.
Service Desks: this is a much more broad and encompassing category. At the highest level, service desks can be referred to as support centers or the first point of contact between a service provider and the end user.
Ticketing: ticketing can be broad or narrow depending on the lens you approach it from. Generally, ticketing is a subset or way to handle, support, track and speed up incidents. Help desks, service desks and workflows can all interact with this idea of ticketing, oftentimes outside of the regular IT scope.
Workflows: Workflows refer to the exchange of information from one point to another. There are multiple combinations that include both people and machine. Workflows can sound tricky; however it’s important to note that most help/service/ticketing solutions leverage workflow components in today’s day and age. Remote/hybrid work, scaling cross-functional teams…it’s imperative that they are connect and not reduced to working in silos.
Workflow systems like Jetdocs incorporate the resolution of help desk and service desks, while ensuring ticketing and workflows are done in a modern way.
How does Jetdocs think about Service Desks? (hint: it’s not just IT!)
At Jetdocs we think about the idea of service even more generally. As our friends at Oxford say, service “is the action of helping or doing work for someone”. In the business realm, every employee is always helping someone else out.
Building on IT best practices and the idea of service, we like to think of the impact across every department, business unit and business function. At the end of the day, each one of them provides value in varying degrees to the organization. Whether it it HR, Finance & Accounting, Legal or Building Management, each one of these units continually field and support requests as the company moves towards their quarterly or annual goals.
How do you empower our business units to provide the best service?
While each department has different ways of providing service, they typically all involve another employee or user requesting information through a ‘request’, the request being received, actioned (or reassigned and actioned), followed by a completion step.
Companies that are able to understand this internal request problem are able to provide scaffolding as their organization scales. We believe the best way is to allow business units to create their own workflows of how they want to operate, and as people request service from them, they can be guided through the request, which after the user submits, is directly routed to the appropriate person.
From an implementation side there are 2 key points to take into consideration:
1. Having a small team triage every type of service request can create more work than less. Establishing key points of contact for each service unit is imperative to increasing your companies speed and getting requests completed on time.
2. Self service is important as employees need a place to start their request. Asking an employee to send a request to operations@company.com makes it difficult to set expectations for both the employee and the ones on the other end.
Part of the reason we launched Jetdocs on Microsoft Teams is because every employee is already ‘plugged-in’ to the ecosystem, making it easy to direct employees to a central self-serve location, plus, all notifications can be received in chat (where they’re already working).
Every internal request ends up with a business unit
To summarize, IT is no longer the only business unit that provides service to an organization. The difference with IT and these other business units is they have a framework in place to action these requests.
At Jetdocs we understand that different business units operate in different ways. We are the self-serve portal and first step for every type of internal request. With over 75 templates that come out-of-the-box, these workflows can be designed, assigned and reassigned. If you have your own use cases, you’re able to create your own custom templates too!
The result? A seamless Microsoft Teams application that is plugged into where your organization is already working.
Want to learn more? Get a demo or try Jetdocs for free here.
