Devoted to Help Desk and Technical Support personnel and applications

Your SLAs' may not be changing with the New Year, but 2008 brings new expectations.  Those expectations come from your chain of command and your team.  "Out with the old and in with the new" can have multiple meanings and dimensions.  Whether or not you believe in or like making your own New Years resolutions, your upper management is making new years resolutions.  You and your staff play a role in the goals they are setting.  Putting together your own list of goals is important.  Here are the main issues I see for help desks this year:

1. Meeting SLAs and being able to show that your team is meeting your SLAs all year long.
2. For in house IT departments - it is getting more and more challenging to prove that your support team should not be outsourced.  Keeping your customers happy and proving that your team is valuable is critical.
3. If you are with an outsourcing company, your biggest challenge is to keep the contract when the next bid comes up.
4. It has been almost a year since Microsoft burned us with Vista.  Since Vista only makes up 30% of operating system sales, I have a feeling that Microsoft will come out a solution that works.  (Some businesses are choosing to get XP now and upgrade to Business or Ultimate later.)
5. Keeping your Most Valuable Players (MVPs) around.  The hard truth is all employees are expendable, but I once witnessed the deterioration of a help desk (from afar) where several MVPs walked out within weeks of each other.  This occurred at a critical time - during a service evaluation - and as a result the help desk lost the contract. 

What do you think your biggest challenges will be this year?