I'm Max Hazell. I came up through hands-on IT support and into IT Operations management, and I run IT operations day-to-day for a mid-sized engineering business — this isn't theory recycled from a framework, it's the same work I do every week.
My work covers the full breadth of an internal IT service — including leading a device refresh of 538 laptops alongside business-as-usual support:
Measurable results
91%
reduction in average resolution time
90%
reduction in first-contact time
A major service improvement programme I worked on contributed to the resolution and first-contact improvements above. These are anonymised results from my professional IT operations experience — not client results from a Service Desk Builder audit.
Why this exists
I kept seeing teams reach for a new tool before properly diagnosing how the existing service was operating. A new platform gets suggested, budget gets spent, and the same operating problems follow everyone straight across. Service Desk Builder started as technology for making service analysis more structured and repeatable — the checks I'd otherwise run by hand.
The Service Desk Performance Audit combines that methodology and technology with my own operational judgement. It's the assessment I'd run if you brought me in for a week — done properly, and priced so a Head of IT can sign it off without a procurement cycle.
The audit is AI-accelerated and human-judged: analysis tooling does the reading, ten years of running and improving service desks does the deciding.
Methodology
ServiceDeskBuilder assesses six areas of service desk performance — Incident Management, Service Requests, Knowledge Management, Automation & Efficiency, Asset & Service Management, and Reporting, Leadership & User Experience — using structured questions and scoring designed around practical service management operations, not textbook theory.
It's deliberately vendor-neutral: the same framework applies whether you run ServiceNow, Freshservice, Jira Service Management, Zendesk, HaloITSM, ManageEngine or nothing formal at all. The questions ask about how the service actually operates, not how a particular product is configured.
The aim isn't to produce a compliance certificate or an accreditation — ServiceDeskBuilder doesn't claim or imply any formal accreditation. It's to identify performance gaps and improvement priorities you can act on, expressed as a maturity/performance score rather than a percentile, until there's a large enough anonymous dataset to support genuine cross-organisation benchmarking.
Tell me about your service desk and we'll get started — or run the free Health Check first.
Get the full Performance Audit