Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #51712 in Books
• Published on: 2001-03-17
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Book Info
A text presenting specific improvements that can be made to Information Technology organizations in order to make them more efficient and to help them resolve problems quickly and effectively. Includes coverage of staffing and other human issues, better ways to create service level agreements, and much more. DLC: Electronic data processing--Management.

From the Back Cover

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.

About the Author

GARY WALKER is a leading IT consultant, helping Fortune 500 and emerging growth companies focus on the people, processes, and technology required to operate a highly reliable and cost effective infrastructure.

Customer Reviews

Old handouts
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...
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.

Not about Problem Management!
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.