How Do IT User Personas Affect Efficiency?

IT service management plans often end up involving many stakeholders and organizations need a solution with dashboard functionality that can meet the needs of this diverse user group.

IT service management plans often end up involving many stakeholders and organizations need a solution with dashboard functionality that can meet the needs of this diverse user group. A generic dashboard or workspace in an IT service desk may be useful in that it can provide basic information about what is happening within the ITSM system as a whole, but a more nuanced solution that can be customized for different user personas can deliver considerable efficiency gains by connecting individuals with the information that is most relevant to them.

With the benefits of persona-based dashboards in mind, let’s look at a few different personas and how a customer workspace can benefit them:

IT managers
An IT manager is probably not going to be doing too much when it comes to handling standard support tickets. Instead, managers need to be made aware of key reporting data pertaining to performance within the service desk. Tools that showcase and prioritize authorizations and requests for help on complex tickets can also help managers quickly identify issues that need their attention and respond efficiently.

IT staff member
Like IT managers, most IT staff members will not be handling the bulk of the incidents that come into the service desk. Instead, these workers need to focus on identifying underlying problems and effectively completing the change tasks as necessary. Having a dashboard that showcases tickets coming into the service desk and providing related data isn’t going to be useful. However, a workspace that highlights the various change operations that will need to be completed during the day, problems that need exploration and other issues that impact the IT configuration can be incredibly helpful.

Support workers
You don’t want your support team getting distracted by information about the background IT processes that are going on. Instead, your support personnel need a dashboard that gives them the closest access to users possible and allows them to work through tickets quickly and efficiently. A dashboard that focuses on support-specific tasks becomes invaluable, in particular with service desk teams, because so much of their job is built around providing the fastest response possible.

End users
Giving users access to the service desk can make it easier for them to get into the knowledge center, file service requests and complete support tickets quickly and easily. However, you don’t want their dashboard cluttered with information about the various support tasks that are going on, you want their workspace to focus on important updates and ways to access important information.

Each user persona will use the service desk in a specific way, and getting dashboards to align with these nuances can play a key part in improving operational efficiency.

Original article