HDI is about to begin shipping a new book entitled, Implementing Service and Support Management Processes: A Practical Guide. Ron Muns, CEO and Founder of HDI, describes it as "the first comprehensive process guide for IT or technical Support Center organizations serving internal 'end-users' and/or external customers."

By the looks of Chapters 1 through 3 (available on the Internet via free PDF download), if you are a practitioner or consultant then you will need to check this book out. As a management consultant with an operations background, some of the things that jumped out at me in Chapter 1 were:

• good overview of the Balanced Scorecard measurement methodology in the context of a support center
• detailed, typical cost performance metrics in support centers covering areas such as phone metrics, self-help metrics, self-healing metrics, email metrics, chat metrics, and employee metrics
• example reports cards by role in support organization.

Now its not too easy to do a comprehensive book like this justice in a short blog post so you really need to check it out if this is your space. Here is a listing of the main chapters:

• Financial and Operations Management
• Knowledge Management
• Configuration Management
• Change Management
• Release Management
• Incident Management
• Problem Management
• Service Level Management
• Capacity and Workforce Management
• Availability Management
• IT Service Continuity Management
• Customer Satisfaction Measurement

General HDI membership information can be obtained here, but even non-members can get the guide for a very reasonable cost here at HDI's eStore.

Steve Shu