3.4 What Types of Requests Will Customers Make?

As you create the list of 'stuff' (any ITIL person is going to cringe every time we use that term - which is fine ) then you need to understand what type of request may be made against it. This will help determine what the service desk will be expected to deliver although you may choose not to service certain types of request immediately or not at all. ITIL ( I.T Infrastructure Library ) comes in handy at this point as it offers classifications for requests that can be made to the service desk.

Novell Service Desk also uses the same terminology. Here they are:

Adding this to our previous example of 'stuff' to support gives this:

Category

Item

Request

Department

Description

Hardware

Lenovo W500

Incident

Sales

Standard laptop used by sales teams

Hardware

Dell R710

Incident, Change

I.T

ACME corporate standard server. Changes will require approval

Printers

HP LaserJet P4015DN

Incident

Marketing

Marketing department printer

Software

Salesforce

Incident, Change

Sales, Marketing, Corporate

Company wide CRM. System. Changes would be user addition, changes to rights, and deletion. All require approval

Software

Email

Incident, Change

All

Changes would be user addition / deletion, Mailbox size increase, access to other users mailboxes.

Notice how the description now includes an initial set of changes that will be made.