Managed service desk and infrastructure operations for an Alberta energy company

IT support was split across two vendors and an internal team, with no single view of incidents and no accountability when a problem crossed a boundary. Field sites had the worst experience and the least voice. Mean time to resolve had drifted upward for two years and internal IT leadership was spending its time coordinating vendors instead of improving the estate.

We consolidated first and second line support into a single managed service desk delivered from Alberta, with follow-the-sun third line drawn from the group's global infrastructure practice for out-of-hours coverage. Alberta delivery mattered here: field staff calling from a site at shift change want someone who understands the operating context and is in their time zone.

Transition ran over eighteen weeks with structured knowledge capture from the outgoing vendors and the internal team, because undocumented knowledge walking out of the door is the largest risk in any service desk transition. We built a service catalogue and knowledge base from that capture.

Once stable, the team moved from reactive support into problem management. Roughly a third of first-quarter ticket volume traced to a small number of fixable root causes in identity management, VPN configuration for remote sites, and endpoint imaging.

Managed service with service levels by priority, Alberta onsite for first and second line, distributed third line for continuous cover.

Mean time to resolve improved 45 percent across two quarters. First contact resolution rose to 71 percent. Ticket volume fell an estimated 24 percent as problem management eliminated recurring causes. Field site satisfaction, previously the lowest in the organisation, became the highest. Internal IT leadership time was released from vendor coordination into estate planning and a cloud migration the company had deferred twice.

Multi-vendor support models fail at the seams. Consolidation fixed accountability, and problem management then fixed the estate, which no vendor paid by ticket volume had ever had a reason to do.