Hi all, looking for advice on structuring my approach to this role better.

I'm about 2 months into my first service desk manager role and honestly feeling a bit lost. Background is customer support with a brief research internship — total experience maybe 2-3 years — so I'm fairly early careers and this is my first management role.

It's a solo function with no agents, using Jira Service Management. The environment is fairly niche and technical, and the people who resolve tickets are colleagues from other teams rather than people I manage directly. I'm the first point of contact and responsible for the processes, but technical resolution sits with others. The service desk supports users of a digital platform rather than handling hardware or infrastructure issues — think software access, user onboarding, data requests and general platform queries.

My line manager is on the technical side so there isn't much specific guidance on the service desk management side of things. The function itself is also relatively new, so while the basic ticketing workflows, request types and forms are in place, there isn't much else established beyond that. A lot of what good looks like still needs to be defined.

I've done some process building and documentation but mostly when instructed to rather than proactively identifying what needed to be done myself. That's part of the problem — I don't have a strong enough grasp of what the role should look like to know what to work on without being told.

I'm planning to start ITIL 4 Foundation but wanted to ask — for those who've run solo or small service desks in non-traditional environments, particularly early in your career, what would you prioritise? What helped you develop the intuition for what you should be doing?

Thanks in advance.