We have all contacted the IT service help desk when a system did not work or the machine simply refused to boot up. Most of us have also used a project management solution to track our projects and ensure we deliver projects on time and within budget. What does not strike us at first glance is that these two components of daily work life are often managed by the same system.
We may ask ourselves: why is the help desk solution linked to the project management software? There are several reasons to link these two types of systems:
To avoid information loss. Since most user requests are not resolved at the time of the request, they need to be transferred to another team that will act on the situation. Entering manual data increases the risk of delaying the resolution of the problem.
To reduce the distance between developers and customers. When a developer has access to the exact comment/request of said customer, this improves the understanding of the request and accelerate its resolution.
To accelerate action on bugs. When a bug/error is discovered on one system, having it entered in the help desk system speeds up its assignment to the right team/developer.
As a side note, we have tracked these two product categories for just a few years. In comparison, we have amassed data on LMS, SIS, CRM, and email systems for nearly a decade. At the time of this post (March 2022), we have over 2,000 institutions (an increase of 1,300 since August 2019) for these two product categories.
We wanted to know if many companies are present in both categories. The answer is yes! ZenDesk, SolarWinds, BMC Software, and Cherwell are often used as a Help Desk (HD) product but less so as a Project Management (PM) tool. On the other end of the spectrum, Smartsheet, Trello, Oracle and Planview are only used as PM tools. TeamDynamix, Atlassian, ServiceNow and Microsoft are in a different category since they are used as a PM tool and as an HD product. Also, we can note that homegrown systems are still being used in both product categories.
When drilling into the help desk product category, we noticed that this category is well implemented in all world regions. If we put North America aside, we have lots of data in Europe (especially in the United Kingdom) as well as in Asia (China, being the most represented country in this category).
