Meet The Team – With Service Desk Analyst James Brearley

James Brearley is a Service Desk Analyst with the ICT team at Suttons Group, based in our Hemel Hempstead office. James and the rest of the service desk team are responsible for ensuring staff across the globe are connected and able to work should any IT issues arrive. Recently James has played an important role in Suttons’ response the Covid pandemic, ensuring that staff across the business remained operational during the transition to remote working.

How long have you been at Suttons and can you describe your progression and journey?

I joined the company in January 2018 as part of an apprentice programme that the company was running at the time. During the first year of my apprenticeship I regularly attended a Microsoft training centre in London whilst gaining on the job experience. Throughout the apprenticeship program I had to achieve certain Microsoft certifications, I am pleased to say I passed these certifications with distinction. After completing my apprenticeship, I was taken on at Suttons on a full-time basis and I am currently working as a service desk analyst

My role is generally looking after any tickets which come through the service desk portal.

What does a typical day for a member of the ICT service desk team consist of?

A day in the life of a service desk analyst involves dealing with incidents, change requests, moves and changes through the business, procurement of hardware, and project related activity. It also extends to analysts having to be available out of hour, to cater to our international staff who work outside of normal UK working hours.

For the analyst who is on call for out of hours work (this is rotated every week to a different agent) their job is also to is to perform various checks of the infrastructure to ensure that it is in a healthy state. If there are any concerns these are then dealt with in accordance to our escalation process.

The on-call analyst is also responsible for providing 24-hour support to the business via the out of hours phone line during the week that they are on call.

We are a team of 6, but generally must deal with between 400-600 tickets a month. This does not include any project work we are working on; this is on top of anything that we must deal with as part of our personal development plans. As you can imagine, we are kept very busy!

What have you recently achieved or have been proud of recently in work?

I am pleased to have been involved in executing the business continuity plan in response to the recent Covid pandemic, which ensured that our users were able to take home their business computers so they were able to work effectively from home with no down time. The first two weeks of Covid were really challenging, but very rewarding to know that the business was able to remain operational with no downtime to operations.

I have also been extremely lucky to have been involved in various high-profile projects such as:

• The recent upgrade to the Citrix environment.

• The global endpoint migration and the UK mobile migration from EE to Vodafone

These projects have not only taught me the importance of delivering a new service, but also essential skills as planning, communication, and execution.

I am now very comfortable with working within the ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) standards framework and within the Prince 2 methodology. Although I’m proud, I am also grateful that the IT management team provide me ongoing mentorship and also put trust in my ability to be able to work on such important projects.

What do you enjoy outside of work?

Outside of work, I enjoy walking the dogs and I am looking forward to when the gyms open again although it will be a shock to the system when we are able to return to normal.

Prior to Covid, I would typically go to all the Watford FC home games and I have been a season ticket holder for 18 years. I am really looking forward to when we can go back to games as nothing beats that atmosphere!

I am also a keen petrol head; I love anything related to cars. I enjoy the modified car scene and have personally had 9 cars so far and counting!