An Incident Management Script for the Adair Library

The help desk staff at the Adair Library is small, but its responsibilities for providing help desk services are growing. The help desk provides support to library staff who work in multiple offices and also to the public who access email and the web through workstations in the library building. Most contacts with library staff are on the phone; most contacts with the public, however, are face to face.

The current help desk procedures rely primarily on informal communication between help desk staff members:
Scribbled notes and phone messages about requests for support assistance
A bulletin board in the help desk office where notes about ongoing problems are posted
A clipboard that lists pending incidents that need resolution
The wastebasket as a closed incident archive
The help desk staff would like to transform its current method for handling support problem incidents into a more structuredincident management workflow.
Based on what you learned about incident management in this chapter, write a first draft of a sample script that could be used to train new agents to handle incidents at the help desk in the library. Your script should cover the basic tasks in incident management that you learned about in this chapter. Your script should also cover how to close an incident. Incorporate your own ideas on effective handling of incidents and help desk client relationships.