For the past couple years, it had become routine for Nick to return home from work well past midnight. Like so many other help desk technicians, Nick found himself consistently working overtime just to keep up with the flow of incoming tickets and meet his organization’s SLAs. Overcome with a flood of tickets for user onboarding and modification, folder permissions, vendor contact management, group management, password management, and so on, Nick’s work had started to take its toll on his health and personal life.
His daily routine involved collecting new hire details from HR, creating user accounts, assigning appropriate permissions to users for resource access, managing vendor contacts, managing user accounts and group membership, resetting passwords, and so on. And these tasks had to be performed not for one or two employees, but for scores of users every day. Add to this the delay caused by a lack of timely communication by other stakeholders. In the midst of yet another stream of new hires, Nick heard about ADManager Plus and decided to try it.
Approvals: a better way of doing things
Soon after implementing ADManager Plus, Nick realized that he could delegate his routine tasks to avoid duplication of work. Until then, Nick had to ask HR or managers for information about the tasks to be performed, verify the details, and then perform the tasks himself. But now, HR staff or managers can raise requests themselves using a simple console in ADManager Plus, and Nick only has to approve their requests. Best of all, requesters don’t have to spend more time submitting their requests to the help desk; they’re performing the same tasks as before, but instead of providing the details in a spreadsheet or email, they’re using a different portal. This new approval system has taken a huge burden off of Nick’s shoulders. Nick just had to go through a few steps to configure the approval process in ADManager Plus:
Step 1: Create requester roles
The first step for Nick was creating requester roles in ADManager Plus, as shown in the figure below. For example, Nick created the “Permissions Management” role to deal with requests for sharing files and accessing resources.
The person who is assigned this role can raise requests to allow users to access resource folders as well as to add or remove members from groups.
Step 2: Add new requesters
Next, Nick assigned the roles he just created to the appropriate people. As shown in the figure below, Nick assigned the “Permissions Management” role to the finance manager, whose username is “finmanager”. The finance manager can now decide who should get access to finance-related resources in the organization.
Step 3: Requesters raise workflow requests
The finance manager can simply log in to ADManager Plus and raise a request to allow the user Michael to access the resources in a folder “Financedocs”, as depicted in the figure below.
Step 4: Approve requests
Now that Nick has an approval process in place, his role is limited to approving requests raised by HR or managers (i.e. the “finmanager” in the example below).
Even though the request process hasn’t changed for the finance manager, the approval system has made a world of difference to Nick.
Nick is now able to return home early from work, spend quality time with his family, and even hit the gym every day. Does Nick’s story hit a little too close to home? You too can ease the burden of your help desk tasks. Get free license for unlimited workflow requesters and try this feature now. Thank you for joining us for our Building a better help desk blog series. Just in case you missed the other installments, check them out here:
Part 1: Trouble-free user onboarding
Part 2: Secure permission management
Part 3: Simplified vendor contact management
