Service desk

The service desk is where the whole IT organization is judged, usually by people having a bad day. Most of what makes it good is intake discipline and honest measurement.

Intake determines everything downstream

Capture enough at first contact to route correctly and act without a second exchange: who, what they were doing, what happened, what they expected, and how blocked they are.

Give the requester a single channel that works. Multiple half-supported channels — a queue, a chat, a shoulder tap, a manager's direct message — mean the loudest request wins rather than the most urgent, and the desk's workload becomes unmeasurable because most of it is invisible.

Priority is impact against urgency

Priority is not a feeling. Define it on two axes — how many people are affected and how blocked they are — and publish the matrix so it can be applied consistently rather than argued each time.