The ‘Shift Left’ Practice

Shift left is the practice of moving incident fixes from third-line to second-line and then to first-line support, so the service desk resolves a greater share of user requirements without escalation. It reduces cost, frees more expensive second- and third-line staff for project and enhancement work, and improves the user experience.

• Log accurately first: service requests and change requests must not be logged as incidents, and vice versa. First-line fix is not the same as first-call fix; the desk may log an incident and fix it later, which is typically appropriate for lower-priority incidents.
• A world-class first-line fix rate is around 60-65% of all incidents reported to the service desk. To raise it, review the incidents that are not fixed at first line.
• Those usually fail for three reasons: lack of time and resources, where extra first-line staff should be cost-justified by a net reduction in second- and third-line spend; lack of knowledge, addressed by recording full fix details on incident records, incident matching tools and second-line staff shadowing the desk; and lack of authority, addressed by giving front-line staff the permissions they need.
• In the author's experience, fewer than 50% of service providers are familiar with the term, and even fewer have a strategy for achieving it.