A day in the life of the service desk team….

6:30am

Fran heads out to the gym for a strength training class – she loves to start the day feeling strong!

Meanwhile, Jade and Ella are still tucked up in bed (as long as they’ve not been woken by cats or dogs).

8:30am

The whole service desk team logs on and starts work. Some of us are more awake than others… and some of us are still waiting for a breakfast delivery from McD’s! Jade and Ella have home-working contracts, but Fran’s arrived at the Manchester office, pop and morning snacks in hand!

Jade starts the day triaging new tickets – usually a bunch of OpenAthens queries that have come in overnight, from frustrated souls doing late-night studying who can’t login. Ella checks the shared inbox and does the OpenAthens admin checks for all the regional and national organisations that we’re responsible for – approving or rejecting new account requests, moving new users to the appropriate organisation, etc.

Fran meanwhile notices she’s had a couple of replies to tickets she was working on yesterday, so picks those up and moves them on. And then starts some work collating stats for the previous month.

10am

Time for a “huddle” with the rest of the Resource Discovery team – catching up on who’s doing what with the week, sharing intel about a supplier, bouncing ideas off each other, and asking for advice/help with particular issues. Various cats and dogs pop up on screen from time to time, along with the odd teenager on the hunt for food.

11am

Jade continues to monitor the desk for new tickets, sending out responses, fixing things where she can, assigning them to the appropriate teams, and escalating issues to suppliers as necessary.

Ella continues to monitor the shared email inbox, to check for responses from suppliers. She’s also working on tickets that are assigned to her, including some requests to customise a Hub instance with new media placards.

Fran has a Teams meeting with a library service manager to talk about a possible merger of their organisation with another, and what steps they need to think about in terms of merging resources, OpenAthens org IDs and Hub instances.

12noon

Lunchtime for Jade – she’s off to take Domino for a walk. Fran also takes a break and catches up with the Manchester-based colleagues from our wider team over lunch.

Brenda takes over covering the desk, picking up the new tickets as they come in. Brenda’s usually juggling that with monitoring the other team shared email, and Accent course bookings, but is excellent at holding the fort with Ella.

1pm

Switch-over time: Jade supports Brenda on the desk while Ella goes off for her lunch.

2pm

Ella’s now covering the desk, and gets a flurry of tickets from library staff saying that they can’t access the Hub. There’s a whirlwind of Teams messages between us, checking how widespread the issue is, whether there’s anything on the service status page, etc. Ella escalates to the supplier, while Jade puts an announcement out via the service desk and sends a message to the Content email list, letting everyone know that there’s an issue and it’s in hand. Ella continues responding to new tickets, grouping them together as parent and child tickets.
Jade meanwhile works on producing some usage stats from the data that Third Iron send over to us.

4pm

We get an update from the supplier saying the Hub issue is now fixed. Having double-checked for ourselves, Ella sends the good news out around the system, and closes down the tickets in the service desk.

Jade does a second round of OpenAthens admin.

Fran shares with the team some lovely feedback we’ve received from a satisfied customer about the service they had from us – it’s always appreciated, and puts a big smile on our faces!

5pm

We’re done for the day: 24 new tickets received, 21 tickets resolved, 65 new OpenAthens accounts approved/rejected, 2 stats spreadsheets created, alongside meetings, emails and Teams chats.*

We log off, still smiling in the knowledge that we’ve done some good work today, and helped make access to the best available evidence a little bit easier for some people. *average daily figures from Jan/Feb 26.

Fran Wilkie, Jade Brunt, Ella Hale

NHS England (Workforce, Training & Education)