ThinkITSM Blog

Incident backlog provides an informative KPI that you should consider adding to your reporting repertoire. The KPI should measure the number of incidents outstanding that have missed an SLO or SLA. The KPI should be trended over time and should either be stable or decreasing.

In the example chart below, we can see the backlog rising over the last three months.

In this example we see the backlog increase by 50% over 3 months and should be investigated. To determine how urgent the issue is the first thing to explore is to breakdown the  backlog by incident priority.

It would be highly unlikely that a backlog with high priority issues would persist over a period of time and the chart above now shows that a majority of the back log are priority 3 and 4. This is fairly common and is often systemically ignored. However, it is worthwhile to examine further. 

The reasons for the rising trend could include:

- Second line support personnel are not closing tickets in your ITSM tool.

- Resourcing level may not reflect the current volume of tickets being received on the Service Desk.

- The organizations Change and/or Release practice is causing unscheduled spikes in incident volume

- Are their particular workgroups with particularly high backlogs that could indicate a bottleneck?

Charles Cyna Uncategorized Add new tag, Change, Incident, Incident Backlog, ITIL, ITSM, Key Performance Indicator, KPI, Organization, Release, Reporting, Service Desk, SLA, SLO, Workgroups

For those of you that are culinarily inclined you will know that a soufflé is made with a couple of basic ingredients; a cream sauce and egg whites, and yet the final dish remains elusive to the many that simply don’t pay attention to the details for prerequisite success. Oh, and such success is wonderful to observe - fluffiness contained within a towering cloud of caloric goodness - it is truly an elusive culinary accomplishment.

Figure 1 - The rare object d’art itself - a light fluffy soufflé produced at L’Atelier by Joel Rubuchon.

Like the fracturable soufflé, good service desk reports are easy to order but more difficult to enjoy. 

Although the ingredients are simple, the execution is questionable and the ultimate result is often unsatisfying. The particular reports I am thinking of are not operational in nature (the wham bam thank you ma’am of reports). The ones, I am thinking of are tactical in nature. These require a little more finesse, they are the thinking persons’ report, a tactical view of service desk performance that can enable service improvement and actually inform decision making. In other words, reports that provide information that is ‘actionable’. How delicious!

Anyhow, so many of these failed attempts leave me wanting more. Inadequate execution reduces them to merely visually appealing, useless and perhaps even inconsequential. 

So perhaps we should examine the ingredients and execution that can turn a miserable meaningless humble report into something worth consuming.

Ingredient 1: Consistency

Consistency is one of the few things that matter when generating decision support material. Everyone should be saying the same thing when answering the telephone, asking the same questions, and documenting the information received in the same way.

Ingredient 2: Track the right stuff!

Set yourself up for success and build a support model. Outside of the obvious items like impact, customer information etc. there are three things that the service desk needs to capture:

#1 –what was the customers’ perception of the failure (i.e. the end to end service),
#2 - what was the underlying IT reason for the failure (i.e. the provider service) and,
#3 - finally what infrastructure item was involved in the failure (i.e. the component category).

See the figure below to see a breakdown of the critical criteria that should be captured in the incident.

Figure 2 - The essential elements of information capture for an Incident.

These items enable simple and easy information gathering from the customer plus makes escalation of the issue through the IT organization easier to manage.

Ingredient 3: Focus on the WHAT, the WHY and the ACTION.

Generating reporting for reporting sake doesn’t work. It sounds obvious but many of us get in the habit of reviewing the same reports every month and then do nothing with the information.

If this sounds like you, STOP! 

Ask yourself three things when looking at a report:

Do I care about what this report is telling me?

If your answer is NO, move on and deal with something more important.

If your answer is YES, then you need to figure out WHY the information in the report is occurring.

Once the WHY has been determined, implement a performance tweak or involve the relevant stakeholder group and share the information with them as part of the ACTION.

In my next blog (on Monday), I  will explore a real life example of how this process works.

Charles Cyna Uncategorized Customer Contact Details, Help Desk, Incident Management, Incident Type, IT, IT Service Desk, ITIL, ITSM, Performance Tweak, Reporting, Service Desk

Mean Time to Restore Service is an important KPI that most help desks measure (or at least should). MTRS tells us about the average customer experience a user has when a service interruption is identified.

To calculate the MTRS you take the total amount of time of open incidents divided by the total number of incidents logged in a given time period (normally a month). I would recommend that the KPI only show the top 2 tiers of classification as performance on lower classification would probably reduce the usefulness of the KPI based on how most organization service their lower priority issues.

Now the usefulness of KPI is just that, ‘an indicator’. If it is going in the wrong direction (i.e. up) there is no reason to panic – the most important thing is to identify whether there really is an issue and if so then be in a position to address it as soon as possible.

The first thing to look at in regard to MTRS is to see whether Incident volume has spiked. When incident volume changes unexpectedly, the help desk doesn’t have a chance to change resourcing so the average time to restore service will often rise.

The second thing Read more…

Charles Cyna Uncategorized Add new tag, Classification, end to end service, Help Desk, Incident, KPI, MTRS, Service Desk, Service Interruption, Service Level Agreement, SLO

The job responsibility itself is demanding.  Managing the group that provides support to end user’s IT related service interruptions, as well as being the face of IT.

Below are some of the key reasons that make fulfilling this role challenging.

1.  Right Staffing!  How do you staff a team effectively when the volume of communications can fluctuate widely?  And the cause of fluctuations are beyond the Service Desk Manager’s control (i.e. outage, change gone bad, new rollout, etc.)?

2.  Higher Staff Turnover!  Service desk staff, compared to other IT staff, tend to turnover at a fast rate.  The primary reasons include burnout from constantly dealing with frustrated end users, as well as, staff using the service desk as a stepping stone to other IT areas.

3.  Unrealistic End User Expectations!  Despite the magnitude and complexity of technology, the end users expect, that regardless of the nature of their communication / situation, the service desk analyst should be able to resolve their issue immediately. Read more…

swaxler Uncategorized Service Desk, Service Desk Manager, Service Interruption

Mini-series on measurements that can come back to bite you…..

The trouble with performance metrics is that they can actually encourage inefficiency, de-motivate resources and result in misinformed management decisions if not thoughtfully designed and carefully monitored!

Take for example an organization that has a published target for their Service Desk’s ability to resolve inquiries at the first point of contact (FPOC rate).

This measure is expected to positively impact two important facets of the service desk – customer satisfaction and cost.

Customer Satisfaction - The premise behind this measure is that customers’ satisfaction is positively impacted by quick resolutions.  After all, who doesn’t like to have their questions/issues resolved quickly and without being transferred or bounced around an organization?

Cost  - Generally organizations have tiered levels of support with resource costs increasing at each level. It makes sense that the more incidents/inquiries that can be resolved at FPOC, without handoffs to more expensive tiers of technical support, the more money that can be saved.

Also, organizations often use this measure to compare themselves to other service desk organizations and to communicate their service desk’s value proposition.

While on the surface this seems simple, practical and a no-brainer there are potential “gotchas”. Consider the following simple scenario.

An organization’s service desk proudly promotes an FPOC rate of 80% or better consistently month-over- month.  Remarkably the Desk has been able to maintain this for 6 straight months! Agent’s performance reports show that individually they are meeting or exceeding their assigned FPOC targets.  Comparisons to other service desks FPOC are favourable and management assumes this is a very positive measure – right?

Maybe not, a High FPOC rate may actually be signalling a lot of repetitive incidents.  Agents at the desk can get very skilled and efficient at resolving the same issues over and over again and the hidden cost can be easily overlooked.

Points to Ponder

While initially customers will be pleased with a timely restoration of the service, their satisfaction will drop quickly if they keep having the same problems over and over again.

Resolving the incident quickly with lower cost resources is, on the surface, efficient; however, if that incident is happening repeatedly what is the total cost of the repetitive incident?

From a value perspective, which desk would you choose?  One that has an 80% FPOC but is continuously resolving the same type of incidents or one that has a 50% FPOC but continuously reviews incidents trends and permanently removes repetitive incidents from their environment?

Simple Tips

1. Don’t look at your FPOC in isolation.  Always look for correlation to satisfaction trends and hidden costs.  

2. Seek out and destroy repetitive incidents. Analyze the types of incidents that are being resolved FPOC and identify repetitive incidents for permanent resolution.

3. Use your incident data to “expose the cost” of repetitive incidents and be sure to report the cost savings/avoidance achieved by removing the incidents right along beside your new, possibly lower FPOC number.

4. Your service desk agents are a great source of information on your top repetitive incidents – tap into their knowledge & experience.  Reward them for identifying repetitive incidents and other improvement opportunities.

One Final Thought with a Bit of a New Twist on an Old Measure

Many desks set high FPOC rates but then do not give the agents the tools or permissions they need to achieve it!

If you have a lower than desired FPOC resolution rate, you may want to consider measuring “designed for FPOC”.  You may be surprised to find that your service desk is actually not able to achieve an acceptable FPOC because of the way your support delivery is designed!

Too often the service desk is not provided with the necessary information (troubleshooting scripts, configuration information, etc) or the necessary permissions to actually resolve incidents at FPOC.

This very simple measure, “FPOC by Design”, reflects an organization that has designed support specifically for each product/service, and is monitoring how well its service desk is performing against achievable targets.

Low FPOC on a product that has been designed for FPOC provides an important area to analyze agent performance and training opportunities.  Conversely, high incident areas with low FPOC for products/services NOT designed for FPOC make be a great place to review the support model and look for opportunities to empower your service desk further.

Measurement is definitely an important part of continuously improving your Service Desk and driving up value and customer satisfaction.  Relentless review of relevant, insightful metrics will keep you at the forefront. Next time let’s look at Mean Time to Restore Service (MTRS)………

Question
Have you come across any measures that have done you more harm than good?  Do you have any really GOOD or really BAD measurement stories to share? I’d love to hear them……

Maria Ritchie Uncategorized Customer Satisfaction, First Point of Contact Resolution, FPOC, Maria Ritchie, Measurements, Metrics, Service Desk

Like a successful weight reduction plan, service desk improvements need to be defined based on a good knowledge of where you are and how far you want/need to go. Taking a little time at the beginning of your improvement planning to baseline your service desk practice and inform your improvement priorities will provide you with a surprisingly valuable set of information!

This blog is a follow on to the “ITIL – Not a Cure for the Common Cold!” blog where I provided an overview of a large government’s service management journey and outlined their 5-Step Roadmap to improvement.  This article will focus on getting started, using the case study organization as a guide….

Where do you start with no money, no credibility and no time?

The answer is not really all that difficult.  You have to start with a solid understanding of where you are and knowledge of where you want & need to be.  The art is then to pick the combination of outcomes and activities that will generate momentum, produce useful improvements and build credibility. Read more…

Maria Ritchie Uncategorized Assessment, Best Practices, Help Desk, Incident Management, IT, ITIL, ITSM, Service Desk

Shockingly, ITIL is not a cure for the common cold and suffers from being overprescribed by often well-intentioned but ill-advised ITIL enthusiasts.  Doing ITIL will not necessarily generate any benefits for your organization and can consume significant resources with little return on the investment.  Fortunately the diagnosis is not all bad though.  ITIL can be a powerful tool when coupled with a clear improvement purpose and plan.

As a matter of fact, ITIL was a significant influence in the success of several large IT transformation initiatives that I was involved with as a senior manager in the Ontario Government.  Over the next weeks and months, I will share some of the insights I gained as an IT practitioner using ITIL in the hopes that some part of my experiences may be useful to you on your continual service improvement journeys.

Let’s start at the beginning…… Read more…

Maria Ritchie Uncategorized Business Drivers, Gartner's Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), IT, ITIL, ITSM, Service Desk

ThinkITSM was title sponsor for Wednesday’s HDI Trillium Chapter Annual Conference in downtown Toronto.  The morning keynote was led by an extraordinary person, Vicki Keith, who holds various long distance swimming records including one by swimming continuously for over 5 days (yes, nonstop for 124 hours!). Her speech was titled ‘Penguins can fly’ and I am guilty of admitting that in advance of seeing her was thinking this was a rather silly title as we all know Penguins can’t in fact reach that airborne state known as flying. However, Vicki was quick to dispose of this preconception. She rightly pointed out that if you watch a Penguins under the water, they flap their wings and move through the water as if it were air. She introduced herself as a “penguin’ that never really fitted and it was a lifelong struggle to find her place in the world. She went on to talk about how she uses Swimming to help kids restore or gain self-esteem (read more at http://www.penguinscanfly.ca).

One story in particular was about a 14 year old girl who did not have use of her legs and built a wall of self-loathing around her disability; after seeing Vicki in action she was inspired to swim across Lake Ontario and show that her abilities truly can overcome the disabilities that I am sure everyone focuses on when they meet this tremendous athlete. In many ways, this presentation from Vicki paralleled many of the pre-conceptions that the Service Desk has to overcome in an organization. Read more…

Charles Cyna Uncategorized Help Desk, IT, ITIL, Service Desk, Vicki Keith