ITSupportTraining.co.uk announces its ‘Mastering IT Support Delivery’ (MISD) curriculum of accredited training in IT Support professionalization, for both internal and external support providers. This specialist programme of operational, non-technical education takes full account of the fact that IT Support is not limited to the ‘Service Desk’, but in fact has always spanned the whole of IT and even involves elements of the userbase. This includes those IT departments that do not see themselves as having an IT Support responsibility. Among its hundreds of lessons, MISD shows how to handle IT Support requests without impacting on other work.
MISD is a means by which a business or its Human Resources (HR) managers can insist on professional, considered IT Support. Not just a training platform, but a tested, proven way of delivering IT support, MISD provides direction, structure, and method where before there may only have been a policy of hiring groups of technicians and hoping for the best.
Courses
The curriculum’s four courses provide a career-spanning platform of knowledge, practice, and conduct.
The ‘Foundation and Operative‘ dives immediately into how to do the IT Support job in either and internal or external support environment. It establishes the theme of ‘how-to’ practicality that runs throughout the curriculum, dealing with such matters as how IT Support is organised, the importance of measurement, the business significance of IT Support, relationships with managers and users, and much more.
The ‘Aspiring Manager‘ qualification addresses the ubiquitous problem faced by IT, of having to promote technicians to management roles. This unique course deals solely with the huge mindset shift that must be undergone for that promotion to also be a transition of approach and behavioural change. It deals with the IT reality that technical and management thinking are poles apart; and when this is not addressed, promoted technicians may simply continue to be technicians, thus depriving their departments of the intended, much needed management. The MISD lesson here is one of philosophy as well as practicality. A key deliverable is the new manager’s daily to-do list.
The next step is ‘Operational Manager‘, covering the day-to-day practicality of running any IT workgroup where support is provided, from Servicedesk, through Desktop and Network, to Business Applications and Vendor relations. The workgroup is shown to be a production unit, where staff job satisfaction shares importance with productivity, throughput, and reflecting business need. As are all four courses, this is packed with tested and proven ‘how-to’ techniques, algorithms, methods and practices.
Finally, ‘Advanced Manager‘ deals with the ultimate questions of IT Support provision. The link to the business is clear, in the study of the complex relationships of co-dependent departments and services. IT Support provides the Cost-Benefit analyses and considered Bases of Decision to design, structure, staff and cost-justify itself. Here, nothing is done just because everybody else does it, but in full consideration and calculation of the business needs, not just practically, but politically, financially, and strategically.
Practice
This important programme is based on decades of research, practice, and documentation in the building of world-class IT Support provisions. MISD’s unique approach differs from current offerings in many ways; but in particular that it is equally applicable to both internal support from the in-house IT department, but to external support as from vendors, Value Added Resellers (VAR), Managed Service Providers (MSP), or cloud and outsourcing entities.
MISD’s focus is in showing the true context of IT Support. This is not just a matter of receiving requests and spraying them to various parts of IT, nor simply working through a backlog of unprioritised tasks. This is because every IT Support request eventually distills down to an impact on user productivity and thus, the variable success of the business. To reflect this often-ignored reality, MISD must go much deeper than any training provision that has preceded it.
But MISD is no new invention. Its ideas and methods have been taught to, used, and proven by private clients for over twenty years. MISD is a public offering of a previously elite provision.
Delivery
MISD is brought to market via accredited training organisations (ATO). These are experienced providers of training in either, or ideally both IT Service Management (ITSM) and the general operative and management arena. Based on MISD’s Body of Knowledge, these ATOs are given the option of tailoring the courses to the requirements of their clients, with any such customisation being tested for compliance by ITSupportTraining.co.uk.
Study may be in the classroom or online. With training completed, students gain the qualification by sitting a separately marked examination for a verifiable certificate.
The student’s HR officers and commissioning managers are encouraged in preparing and cementing the lessons, to help convert the training from education to workday practice. Instructions of how this may be done are given on the MISD Website, for preparation here, and post-training here.
With MISD, every IT technical manager can be given direct instruction in how to do his or her job for the benefit of workgroup staff and the business. The training’s success can be numerically verified and its structure means that it can follow a candidate through a career.
MISD is long overdue. Good IT Support is vital to continued business productivity. Now there is a way of ensuring that, universally across the whole of IT.
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