Helpdesk by Habit: Auditing the Support Channels That Never Log a Ticket
Photo: Foreign and Commonwealth Office, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Most UK organisations have a service desk. Many also have a second, unofficial one: a colleague who is always copied into Teams chats, a manager who takes mobile calls about laptops, a finance officer who quietly resets passwords because it is quicker than raising a ticket. These routes are helpful. They are also invisible. Every request handled outside the formal channel is a data point lost, a recurring fault left unexamined and, often, a dependency concentrated in one person.
The problem is not that staff are bypassing process for malicious reasons. They are usually trying to get work done. The formal service desk may feel slow, distant or bureaucratic; the informal route feels immediate and human. But when the informal route becomes the real service, the organisation loses its ability to see demand, measure performance or plan capacity. For directors and senior managers, the question is not how to stamp out helpful behaviour. It is how to make the helpful behaviour visible without turning it into a police matter.
Why informal support deserves a formal look
A shadow support network is a symptom of unmet need and a source of unmanaged risk. It is a symptom because people route around a service when the service does not fit the moment. It is a risk because the knowledge, access and judgement required to fix problems sit with individuals rather than systems. If the go-to colleague is on leave, resigns or simply has a bad week, the support capability degrades quietly.
There are three practical concerns. First, incidents are not logged, so repeat failures are never aggregated into a pattern. A printer that jams every Monday is handled five times as five separate conversations, never as one maintenance issue. Second, demand is not measured, so service desk staffing and licensing decisions are based on an incomplete picture. Third, informal fixes often involve privileged access or workarounds that bypass change control, security policy or data protection expectations. None of this is necessarily dramatic, but together it creates a governance gap that a board or audit committee would rightly question.
A two-week audit that does not feel like surveillance
The aim is to understand the routes, not to name and shame the people using them. A light-touch audit over two working weeks is usually enough to produce credible evidence. It should be led by IT or by a service management lead with senior sponsorship, and it should be explained to staff as a mapping exercise rather than a compliance check.
Week one: map the channels
Ask a representative sample of staff, perhaps 20 to 30 people across departments, to keep a simple log for five working days. The log should capture the date, the channel used (Teams, email, mobile, corridor conversation, desk visit), the nature of the request, roughly how long it took and whether a ticket was raised. A one-line entry is sufficient; the point is frequency and pattern, not forensic detail. Alongside the log, hold short interviews with the people most often named as informal helpers. Ask what they are asked, how often, and what they do when they cannot help.
Week two: compare and test
Compare the logs with service desk records for the same period. The gap between the two is the shadow volume. Look for repeat requests, requests that should have been changes, and requests that reveal a single point of failure. Test two or three common informal fixes to see whether they would survive a security or audit review. Finally, calculate a rough time cost: multiply the number of informal requests by the average handling time. The figure does not need to be precise to be useful in a management conversation.
What the evidence usually shows
The findings tend to follow a familiar shape. Demand is higher than the service desk records, sometimes by a third or more in professional services firms where email and chat are the default. A small number of individuals absorb a disproportionate share of requests. Many informal requests are trivial, but a meaningful minority are not: access changes, software installations, data extracts and workarounds that should have been controlled. And there is often a recurring category, such as meeting room technology or remote access, that the formal service is failing to address at the point of need.
The most sensitive finding is the dependency on individuals. If one person handles 40 per cent of informal support for a department, that is a business continuity issue, not just an IT issue. It belongs in the same conversation as succession planning and key-person risk.
A governance fix that keeps the backchannel
The goal is not to ban Teams messages or mobile calls. It is to set a threshold at which an informal conversation becomes a recorded request. A simple triage rule works well: if a request takes longer than ten minutes, affects more than one person or recurs within a month, it must be logged. The service desk should offer a fast lane for quick questions, so that logging feels proportionate rather than punitive. Knowledge captured from informal fixes should be added to a searchable internal FAQ or knowledge base. Informal helpers should be recognised, not reprimanded, and invited to become formal knowledge champions.
A monthly review of shadow demand, even a lightweight one, keeps the issue on the management agenda. Over time, the organisation gets the best of both worlds: the speed and familiarity of informal help, and the visibility and control of a service that can be measured, improved and assured.
