Noel Bruton says poor decisions regarded first and second-line support have created a confused service, with users unsure where to turn. A rethink is needed to improve the service delivered.
The first line takes the enquiries. The second line fixes the enquiries the first cannot. Second line people are paid more than first line. They don’t have to answer the phone all day and their work is less stressful and more interesting, which is why first-liners aspire to ‘be promoted’ into the second line. First-line people are good at dealing with customers. Second line people are better at dealing with systems.
Philosophy
Blah, blah. That’s the received wisdom, and t’was ever thus, apparently. Except it wasn’t. We’d already started to dispense with this tired model over a decade ago. IT support management philosophy had already begun to grow beyond it. We were really getting somewhere, until… And there were so, so many ‘could-have-beens’…
- I saw the support manager of a major retailer at conference after conference, enthusiastically advocating the power, flexibility and efficacy of her radical, but proven structural model for IT support, which could have…
- The pan-European service provider that used unconventional support methods, which revolutionised the outsourced helpdesk and could have…
- That pharmaceuticals manufacturer near London, whose new way of running IT support invariably sped things up, improved both services and job satisfaction and was going so strong that it could have…
- The British bank, whose way of running IT user support made the old models look ridiculously out of date and were so advanced that they could have…
…when suddenly, at the turn of the century, IT support management fashions were abruptly altered by the (invariably external) imposition of the ‘service desk’ concept. Along came ITIL, selling itself upstairs where few people knew how IT support actually works. The service desk was an ITIL Version 2 concept, postulating that as the first line mainly took enquiries (in fact, a fatal false assumption) then it could take more enquiries about more things, indeed even take on the clerical work of such matters as service and change requests, procurement and general IT reception. So it would become an even bigger first line, needing relationships with even more second lines.
Blame the X-Factor
Consequently, with a sigh of resignation, we all took several philosophical and organisational steps backwards. The service desk took all the old first-line / second-line problems, amplified and institutionalised them and set them in concrete (well, paper at least) for a decade. What a let-down.
A similar thing happened in music about that time. There was Glastonbury, Reading, V, BBC 6, new producers working in their bedrooms making this new fin-de-siècle trip hop and putting it straight on MySpace, faster, faster, ever more creative and exciting, and now here comes I-Tunes, wow, we’re revolutionising music, yes! Yes! And then along came the sad squelch of ‘The X Factor’, and suddenly, popular music was all about drab covers and every other new ‘artist’ looked as though they’ve come straight from the weddings circuit. What a let-down. It’s like the arrival of Health-And-Safety at a conker contest, or your Dad trying to join in with your fast keepy-uppy and immediately dropping the ball. Sigh. Corporatisation killed creativity, again.
Soon, all ITSM software began to look the same. Nobody dared to innovate. Not even the software could inspire us to do anything other than stick with the old, technocratic ways, following dull, wizened processes designed by bureaucracy rather than service and technocracy rather than mutuality.
Thus was the development of IT support retarded by several years. It was the wrong solution to the wrong problem. As a result, we are commonly still stuck with this first-line / second-line thing, years after we’d already intellectually and structurally surpassed it. Even now, we still have to deal with its 1980’s-style technocratic demarcations and its anachronistic ranking of knowledge before service.
Sarcophagus
Down here in IT support, where the real work gets done and where ITIL fears to tread – oh yes it does, just compare Version 2 with Version 3 – we know what really makes the difference. This first-line / second-line thing brings with it a sarcophagusful of ancient conventions, rituals, hierarchies and impediments, most of which we can and should manage out of existence. But it’s difficult.
Join in if you know the chorus of this first-line anthem – the second line hardly ever gets back to the user. A quarter of the first line’s calls are from users asking about whether there has been any progress on enquiries that we’ve already sent to the second line. We cannot give the user a clear expectation of when his ‘incident’ will be resolved because the second line won’t give us any guarantees. You cannot contact anybody in the second line because they’re never in the office. And if they do document the call, they’re far more likely to put “fixed” or “sorted” in the resolution field than anything useful.
And from the other side, the second liners bemoan how the first line never asks the right questions. They don’t fill in the call log properly, so we have to repeat their work. They send the assignments to the wrong people. They try to go direct to individual technicians when their manager has got them doing something else that day, so interrupting their work. Because the first line can’t answer technical questions, the users call the second line directly – more interruptions.
And don’t expect a solution to come from ITIL. Its key offering here is the woefully naïve ‘incident management’ function. The first line should own the call and follow it through, making sure the second line does what it’s supposed to do. Yeah, right, like first liners would ever have that kind of clout. Even more distasteful is the function’s inherent chauvinistic accusation of second-line unprofessionalism that would even give rise to such a bureaucratic notion as incident management. It should not be – should never have been – necessary.
The Machine Stops
But there’s a light at the end of this tunnel. As E.M. Forster predicted, the Machine has Stopped. ITIL has at last stepped away from IT support, in fact it was barely in view at all at the recent Service Desk and IT Support Show in London. We’re free again. We have an opportunity to resume our progress towards better ways of running IT support for the benefit of our staff, our customers and the efficiency and effectiveness of our working methods.
And to my mind, one of the first things we should address is this first-line, second-line thing. We can simply make it work better of course, but there’s really nothing stopping us from even deciding to do it a different way altogether. Or we can find a way of improving its slickness in the short term, as we progress in a managed way towards a more mature service in some planned, organised future. We can work out something that’s better for careers, structure, reporting, communication, ownership and responsibilities, duties and functions. We can shift the burdens this way or that or even invent whole new ways of carrying them.
Workshop
A number of my recent clients have asked me to help with this issue. It seems to be so common that I’ve designed an onsite workshop to deal with it. I have called the workshop “IT Support Strategy and Process.” That’s a rather corporate title, but at its heart is this first-line / second line thing. It’s a facilitated interaction for all involved managers to work out in a structured way, in open forum, how best to produce, own and deliver the IT support service, under the guidance of one who’s had to address this for lots of companies before.
I feel we need to do this because we’ve been without effective guidance in this area for too long. We IT support professionals have to return to and move on from the organisational progress we were about to achieve. And we can begin from the developments we had already made, at a time before IT support success came to be measured in the number of ITIL buzzwords you could select from a questionnaire, rather than in the proven effectiveness and efficiency of how IT support is produced and delivered.
The farmer and the cowhand should be friends, goes the song in ‘Oklahoma!’ First and second lines don’t need to be simply two sides of a technocratic coin, but instead, partners in a mutually respectful and beneficial working relationship, that produces a better service the way we all know our host company needs it to be. We know the problems and the topics we have to address. But perhaps we don’t yet know the ideal solutions, but we can learn from those who are already there.
So if you need an expert facilitator to work out your new first-line / second-line thing, I’ll bring the structure and impartiality. On the other hand, if you need to bury the hatchet, I’ll bring the spade – along with a pick to help tear down the wall.
Noel Bruton is a UK-based consultant and trainer, who assists organizations in a wide range of industries in the practicalities of IT support management and improvement. He is the author of best-selling books on all aspects of IT support service delivery. See more on this topic and others at his website, www.noelbruton.com.
Copyright © 2012 ServiceDesk360 All Rights Reserved.
Noel Bruton says poor decisions regarded first and second-line support have created a confused service, with users unsure where to turn. A rethink is needed to improve the service delivered.
The first line takes the enquiries. The second line fixes the enquiries the first cannot. Second line people are paid more than first line. They don’t have to answer the phone all day and their work is less stressful and more interesting, which is why first-liners aspire to ‘be promoted’ into the second line. First-line people are good at dealing with customers. Second line people are better at dealing with systems.
Philosophy
Blah, blah. That’s the received wisdom, and t’was ever thus, apparently. Except it wasn’t. We’d already started to dispense with this tired model over a decade ago. IT support management philosophy had already begun to grow beyond it. We were really getting somewhere, until… And there were so, so many ‘could-have-beens’…
- I saw the support manager of a major retailer at conference after conference, enthusiastically advocating the power, flexibility and efficacy of her radical, but proven structural model for IT support, which could have…
- The pan-European service provider that used unconventional support methods, which revolutionised the outsourced helpdesk and could have…
- That pharmaceuticals manufacturer near London, whose new way of running IT support invariably sped things up, improved both services and job satisfaction and was going so strong that it could have…
- The British bank, whose way of running IT user support made the old models look ridiculously out of date and were so advanced that they could have…
…when suddenly, at the turn of the century, IT support management fashions were abruptly altered by the (invariably external) imposition of the ‘service desk’ concept. Along came ITIL, selling itself upstairs where few people knew how IT support actually works. The service desk was an ITIL Version 2 concept, postulating that as the first line mainly took enquiries (in fact, a fatal false assumption) then it could take more enquiries about more things, indeed even take on the clerical work of such matters as service and change requests, procurement and general IT reception. So it would become an even bigger first line, needing relationships with even more second lines.
Blame the X-Factor
Consequently, with a sigh of resignation, we all took several philosophical and organisational steps backwards. The service desk took all the old first-line / second-line problems, amplified and institutionalised them and set them in concrete (well, paper at least) for a decade. What a let-down.
A similar thing happened in music about that time. There was Glastonbury, Reading, V, BBC 6, new producers working in their bedrooms making this new fin-de-siècle trip hop and putting it straight on MySpace, faster, faster, ever more creative and exciting, and now here comes I-Tunes, wow, we’re revolutionising music, yes! Yes! And then along came the sad squelch of ‘The X Factor’, and suddenly, popular music was all about drab covers and every other new ‘artist’ looked as though they’ve come straight from the weddings circuit. What a let-down. It’s like the arrival of Health-And-Safety at a conker contest, or your Dad trying to join in with your fast keepy-uppy and immediately dropping the ball. Sigh. Corporatisation killed creativity, again.
Soon, all ITSM software began to look the same. Nobody dared to innovate. Not even the software could inspire us to do anything other than stick with the old, technocratic ways, following dull, wizened processes designed by bureaucracy rather than service and technocracy rather than mutuality.
Thus was the development of IT support retarded by several years. It was the wrong solution to the wrong problem. As a result, we are commonly still stuck with this first-line / second-line thing, years after we’d already intellectually and structurally surpassed it. Even now, we still have to deal with its 1980’s-style technocratic demarcations and its anachronistic ranking of knowledge before service.
Sarcophagus
Down here in IT support, where the real work gets done and where ITIL fears to tread – oh yes it does, just compare Version 2 with Version 3 – we know what really makes the difference. This first-line / second-line thing brings with it a sarcophagusful of ancient conventions, rituals, hierarchies and impediments, most of which we can and should manage out of existence. But it’s difficult.
Join in if you know the chorus of this first-line anthem – the second line hardly ever gets back to the user. A quarter of the first line’s calls are from users asking about whether there has been any progress on enquiries that we’ve already sent to the second line. We cannot give the user a clear expectation of when his ‘incident’ will be resolved because the second line won’t give us any guarantees. You cannot contact anybody in the second line because they’re never in the office. And if they do document the call, they’re far more likely to put “fixed” or “sorted” in the resolution field than anything useful.
And from the other side, the second liners bemoan how the first line never asks the right questions. They don’t fill in the call log properly, so we have to repeat their work. They send the assignments to the wrong people. They try to go direct to individual technicians when their manager has got them doing something else that day, so interrupting their work. Because the first line can’t answer technical questions, the users call the second line directly – more interruptions.
And don’t expect a solution to come from ITIL. Its key offering here is the woefully naïve ‘incident management’ function. The first line should own the call and follow it through, making sure the second line does what it’s supposed to do. Yeah, right, like first liners would ever have that kind of clout. Even more distasteful is the function’s inherent chauvinistic accusation of second-line unprofessionalism that would even give rise to such a bureaucratic notion as incident management. It should not be – should never have been – necessary.
The Machine Stops
But there’s a light at the end of this tunnel. As E.M. Forster predicted, the Machine has Stopped. ITIL has at last stepped away from IT support, in fact it was barely in view at all at the recent Service Desk and IT Support Show in London. We’re free again. We have an opportunity to resume our progress towards better ways of running IT support for the benefit of our staff, our customers and the efficiency and effectiveness of our working methods.
And to my mind, one of the first things we should address is this first-line, second-line thing. We can simply make it work better of course, but there’s really nothing stopping us from even deciding to do it a different way altogether. Or we can find a way of improving its slickness in the short term, as we progress in a managed way towards a more mature service in some planned, organised future. We can work out something that’s better for careers, structure, reporting, communication, ownership and responsibilities, duties and functions. We can shift the burdens this way or that or even invent whole new ways of carrying them.
Workshop
A number of my recent clients have asked me to help with this issue. It seems to be so common that I’ve designed an onsite workshop to deal with it. I have called the workshop “IT Support Strategy and Process.” That’s a rather corporate title, but at its heart is this first-line / second line thing. It’s a facilitated interaction for all involved managers to work out in a structured way, in open forum, how best to produce, own and deliver the IT support service, under the guidance of one who’s had to address this for lots of companies before.
I feel we need to do this because we’ve been without effective guidance in this area for too long. We IT support professionals have to return to and move on from the organisational progress we were about to achieve. And we can begin from the developments we had already made, at a time before IT support success came to be measured in the number of ITIL buzzwords you could select from a questionnaire, rather than in the proven effectiveness and efficiency of how IT support is produced and delivered.
The farmer and the cowhand should be friends, goes the song in ‘Oklahoma!’ First and second lines don’t need to be simply two sides of a technocratic coin, but instead, partners in a mutually respectful and beneficial working relationship, that produces a better service the way we all know our host company needs it to be. We know the problems and the topics we have to address. But perhaps we don’t yet know the ideal solutions, but we can learn from those who are already there.
So if you need an expert facilitator to work out your new first-line / second-line thing, I’ll bring the structure and impartiality. On the other hand, if you need to bury the hatchet, I’ll bring the spade – along with a pick to help tear down the wall.
Noel Bruton is a UK-based consultant and trainer, who assists organizations in a wide range of industries in the practicalities of IT support management and improvement. He is the author of best-selling books on all aspects of IT support service delivery. See more on this topic and others at his website, www.noelbruton.com.