Hi all!

I was recently promoted from a Manager from a couple of teams in IT to the Senior Manager over several teams, including our Service Desk. I started by having skip levels with about 20 people on that team, and there was pretty overwhelming feedback about lack of opportunity. When engineering teams are ready to hire someone, they hire from the outside because the Service Desk people aren't prepared for the role. At the same time, my engineering teams (who I manage still, but managed prior to taking on the Service Desk) complain constantly of having to work support tickets at too high of a rate. This would also provide a "farm team" where we could promote within the Service Desk people to this team that we recognize as high potential, then the End User Services engineering team managers can build relationships and train them on higher level tasks.

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The breakdown of our Infrastructure department is like this:

- End User Support & Services - 1st tier support, hardware deployment, asset mgmt, collaboration (Cisco Telepresence/Webex/phone systems etc.), End User Compute (imaging, hardware selection, application packaging, patching, etc.), O365 Platform Engineering

- Infrastructure - networking, servers, virtualization, etc.

- DevOps - Containers, database, etc.

- Security

One suggestion I really liked from 2 different people was an advanced support tier who did patching, more advanced endpoint support (escalate from Tier 1 to Tier 2 instead of to the engineering team to resolve one off Windows/Mac issues), knowledge management, etc. This would provide opportunities for people to stay within End User Support & Services and

Here's where the problem lies. Within the Infrastructure team, they consolidated several lower level network admins, server admins, etc. into a "Support Engineering" team about 2 years ago. I was not in a Senior Mgr role at the time so had no say, but they did not include my group (End User Services & Support) in this team's scope. So I put together a whole presentation about what we could do with an Advanced Support team within End User Services, and thus far I've basically been dismissed with "you just need to move some people into the Support Engineering team we already have". Today, the Support Engineering team does none of that work, focusing solely on supporting networking, servers, active directory, etc. when the Service Desk today. So they are basically saying I should just move 3 people from End User Services to that team to pick up advanced End User Services work.

This doesn't make sense to me for a few reasons to me

• If the Service Desk escalates, it goes outside of End User Services. If they can't resolve it, it comes back to an engineering team within End User Services. Of course this can be overcome and probably isn't a huge deal, it just seems when work passes between orgs it slows down and has potential to cause dysfunction and frustration.
• The Support Engineering team has 1 manager for 7 or 8 people. Once you reach 10 or so, we generally start talking about putting Team Leads in place because with the high expectations on managers, managing 10 different individuals is a lot to take on. So if we pass them 3 people, there's a good chance it's time to start talking about a team lead in that area. If the 3 people stay within End User Services, we have the capacity with one of our managers to manage them.
• We want this team to not only provide these higher level tasks, but also take on some phone support during high volume days/weeks/months. We don't want to handicap our Service Desk by creating this team.
  
• I don't like the idea of recognizing people as rising stars and instead of promoting them within the team, pushing them off to another manager/organization.

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Some things about doing it the way I'm being suggested (moving them to Support Engineering) does make sense and could potentially be a boost to the careers on the team.

• Rather than being pigeonholed into End User Services, they will be learning a lot more areas - Servers, Network, etc.
• "The team already exists, why replicate it when we could just put them on the team that already has these existing processes, etc.?"

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Does anyone have any experience with a second tier support team? Does the Support Engineering team to make sense existing outside of the Service organization? Does having 2 teams make sense? Or no?

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Thanks all!