Are you overworked, unappreciated and under-resourced? This book understands you, and provides years and years of User Support experience packed into one volume. The 'How To' book that every IT department needs, it will help turn your helpdesk into a company asset. How to be successful at probably the most stressful job in IT This book offers tools for measuring productivity and features ten key steps for successful support, while User Support successes and failures are revealed in true life case studies. This book gives you techniques for: *Justifying staff and other expenditure * Gaining senior management support * Getting the users on your side * Running a motivated and productive team * Designing and managing services and service levels The second edition of this popular book brings updates to several of the author's ideas, strategies and techniques with new material on: * Customer Relationship Management - definition and the role of the helpdesk * E-Support and the Internet * Contrasting the Call Center and the Helpdesk * first, second and third line support * Operational Level Agreements * Strategies for backlog management * Telephone technologies in user support In addition there is: * A new Template for a Service Level Agreement * An Improved cost justification model for the Internal Helpdesk * A New cost justification model for the External Helpdesk
Managing the IT Service Process is the first book of its kind to recognize the truth of IT Service delivery. It takes the overall view of the service management process and links together the elements of service level management, systems availability, costs and benchmarking, and the helpdesk. In the last 5 years there has been a major structural shift in the IT industry with the traditional position of Helpdesk Manager being replaced by a new function of IT Services Manager. The industry is now concentrating on the formulation of an end-to-end service process that replaces the previous norm of several disparate and non-integrated sections in an IT department such as the helpdesk, applications maintenance, operations, development procurement and systems management. Managers are focusing on a totality of management so they can correlate costs and processes and offer their customers an integrated service. Managing the IT Services Process is an instructional manual written by an acknowledged industry expert and includes techniques, charts, methods, case studies and anecdotes to support the text. The author encourages the reader to formulate an end-to-end IT service process by using a step by step approach. The text describes and encourages integration in IT and therefore will be useful for managers involved in the unified process.
The Fianna Fáil Party was founded in 1926 and first came to Government in 1932. From that date until 2010, it has completely dominated the political life of the Republic of Ireland. For all but 13 of those 78 years, it has formed the Government of Ireland, either on its own or as the dominant party in a coalition. Fianna Fáil has always seen itself as more than a party. Its self-image has been that of a national movement, one that represented the nation in microcosm and superseded partisan and regional prejudices. While holding this view of itself, it also managed to be the most ruthlessly, successful and professional party machine in Europe. Noel Whelan, the distinguished political commentator and columnist, is steeped in the Fianna Fáil tradition. In this book, he traces the party's fortunes from its foundation by Eamon deValera and Seén Lemass in the 1920s through the economic war of the 1930, war time neutrality and stagnation of the 1950s. Lemass's Governments of the 1960s, generally regarded as the best in the history of the State, restored the Country's fortunes, but the 70s and 80s were locust years dominated by the divisive and charismatic figure of Charles J. Haughey. Under the later leadership of Bertie Ahern, party divisions were healed, and it seemed that national divisions were healed with them. An economic boom was allowed recklessly to run out of control with the result that the party, having brought Irish prosperity to a new peak, was then blamed for the sudden violence of the crash. The general election of 2011 reduced Fianna Fáil to its lowest ebb since it was founded. It may not have marked the end of the party, but it clearly marked the end of an era that began in 1932.
Once fashionable and plush with flowers, post-war Mayfair has lost its dazzling charm. But that didn’t stop Charlotte Nettel and her husband Sir John from swapping life in the quiet northern countryside to convert their roomy Mayfair townhouse into flats. Their tenants come in all shapes and sizes – from pregnant couple Jack and Jenny to German migrants Paula and Heinrich – and they provide a constant stream of both entertainment and anxiety. But it’s Charlotte’s stepdaughter Penny, a disillusioned young women born into the uneasy interwar world, who proves to be the most difficult and scandalous tenant . . . Flashing between the lives of each tenant Carnegie Medal winning author Noel Streatfeild gives us a kaleidoscopic view of post-war London in her ingenious novel, Grass in Piccadilly. For fans of Muriel Spark’s A Far Cry From Kensington.
Expert herbalist Maria Noël Groves has advice for budding herb gardeners: grow just what your body needs! In Grow Your Own Herbal Remedies, Groves provides 23 specially tailored garden plans for addressing the most common health needs, along with simple recipes for using each group of herbs. For chronic stomach problems, marshmallow, plantain, rose, fennel, and calendula make the perfect medicine, with recipes for tummy tea and gut-healing broth. Whether the need is for headache relief, immune support, stress relief, or a daily tonic, readers will learn the three to six herbs that are most effective and how to plant, harvest, and care for each one. In all of Groves’s plant suggestions, the emphasis is on safe, effective, easy-to-grow herbs that provide abundant harvests and can be planted in containers or garden beds.
Silver Nautilus Book Award Winner for Health & Healing An antacid or an aspirin may soothe your pain, but it doesn’t cure the cause of your symptoms. Headaches, indigestion, fatigue, allergies, anxiety, eczema, high blood pressure, and other conditions are clues to a deeper imbalance in your body, and learning to read those clues is a key step in maintaining optimal health. Herbalist Maria Noël Groves shows you how to read your body’s signals and support your own wellness with herbal remedies and other natural treatments. You’ll learn how each of your major body systems — respiratory, digestive, immune, nervous, memory, reproductive, circulatory, and more — optimally functions, and you’ll discover how to use natural remedies to nourish and repair problem areas, restore lost vitality, support your body as a whole, and prevent future problems. Groves includes in-depth instructions, with step-by-step photographs, for making your own herbal remedies, as well as expert guidance on buying and effectively using commercial preparations.
An intimate look at the personal garden of the Dutch landscape designer renowned for his plantings at the High Line in New York City, and Lurie Garden at Chicago’s Millennium Park. Hummelo—near the village of the same name in Gelderland in the eastern Netherlands—is visited by thousands of gardeners seeking inspiration each year. It is Piet Oudolf’s home, his personal garden laboratory, a former nursery run by his wife Anja, and the place where he first tested new designs and created the new varieties of perennials that are now widely available. A follow-up to Oudolf’s successful Landscapes in Landscapes—Hummelo tells the story of how the garden has evolved over the past three decades since Oudolf, Anja, and their two young sons moved onto the property, with its loamy sand and derelict, wood stove-heated farmhouse, in 1982. Text by noted garden author and longtime personal friend Noel Kingsbury places Hummelo in context within gardening history, from The Netherlands’ counterculture and nascent green movement of the 1960s, to prairie restoration in the American Midwest, and shows how its development has mirrored that of Oudolf’s own outstanding career and unique naturalistic aesthetic. Oudolf has long been at the forefront of the Dutch Wave and New Perennial Style movements in garden design, which have ecological considerations at their base. His work stresses a deep knowledge of plants, eschewing short-lived annuals in favor of perennials that can be appreciated for both structure and blooms in every season. He is credited for leading the way to today’s focus on sustainability in garden design. The book will appeal to readers who favor beautiful, biodiverse, and ever-changing plantings: seed heads, grasses, sedges, and winter silhouettes. They will be drawn into its pages by lush photography, often demonstrating how Oudolf views his own work, and providing rare glimpses into his daily life. Short essays highlight important techniques, including scatter plants and matrix planting, and introduce other famed landscape designers—Karl Foerster, Henk Gerritsen, Rob Leopold, Ernst Pagels, and Mien Ruys—to create a full panorama of the movement Oudolf now leads.
This book has been written primarily for medical students and junior doctors in clinical practice, but would also be a useful reference for postgraduate students in chemical pathology (clinical biochemistry), laboratory scientists, pathologists and medical laboratory technologists. It covers the field of chemical pathology, the biochemical basis of disease, and provides a basic understanding of the relationship between abnormal biochemical test results and disease states. A rational approach to proper selection and interpretation of biochemical investigations is adopted for each organ system or analyte covered in the 28 chapters. Emphasis is placed on areas and problems most commonly met with in clinical practice. Meant primarily as an introductory study book to the subject rather than as a reference text, the materials have been presented in a clear, condensed format to aid the study process. The written text is amply supplemented with relevant illustrations.
A life of glamour and tragedy, set against the watershed cultural and political movements of twentieth-century Europe. "Toto" Koopman (1908–1991) is a new addition to the set of iconoclastic women whose biographies intrigue and inspire modern-day readers. Like her contemporaries Lee Miller or Vita Sackville-West, Toto lived with an independent spirit more typical of the men of her generation, moving in the worlds of fashion, society, art, and politics with an insouciant ease that would stir both admiration and envy even today. Sphinxlike and tantalizing, Toto conducted her life as a game, driven by audacity and style. Jean-Noël Liaut chases his enigmatic subject through the many roles and lives she inhabited, both happy and tragic. Though her beauty, charisma, and taste for the extraordinary made her an exuberant fixture of Paris fashion and café society, her intelligence and steely sense of self drove her toward bigger things, culminating in espionage during WWII, for which she was imprisoned by the Nazis in Ravensbruck. After the horrors of the camp, she found solace in Erica Brausen, the German art dealer who launched the career of Francis Bacon, and the two women lived out their lives together surrounded by cultural luminaries like Edmonde Charles-Roux and Luchino Visconti. But even in her later decades, Toto remained impossible for anyone to possess. The Many Lives of Miss K explores the allure of a freethinking and courageous woman who, fiercely protective of her independence, was sought after by so many but ultimately known by very few.
Continuing the sensational success of the Useless Information Series, the Official Useless Information Society brings you another essential compendium of everything you never needed but always wanted to know. A celebration of the Queens Diamond Jubilee this amazing volume contains all things royal such as: The popular misconception that the royal family cannot vote in political elections. It is only the Queen, herself, who is not allowed to vote. Other members of the family merely choose not to; • The Queen learned to drive in 1945 when she joined the wartime army but has never held a driving license; On the occasion of the Duke of Edinburgh's birthday, a Royal gun salute is fired, and the Union Jack is flown on government buildings from 8am until sunset; Lord Mountbatten, Prince Charles's uncle, tried to arrange a betrothal between his own grand-daughter, Amanda Knatchbull and Charles. Amanda's father and Prince Philip did not approve and put a stop to it; Harry has two secretaries to handle his fan-mail, which invariably comes from teenage girls asking him for a date. Hopefuls should be made aware that no royal contender may be adopted, divorced, Catholic or born of unmarried parents. In Tudor times Catholics were forbidden from living within 10 miles of the throne.
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