Depending on the way you manage the teams which support
your services and the systems you have available to track and report on that
performance you may have varying ways in which you review the time spent on
providing service support.
There are basically two unescapable truths when
evaluating team performance.
1. Your
team wants to provide good service and
2. They want
to look good doing it. (Not in fashion but in performance)
When requests come into the service desk there may be an efficient
tracking stopwatch around the support team resolving the request themselves. Request
comes in, is worked on and closed. However what happens when you start to have
more than one group or several groups and the ability to measure components of
work gets complicated?
For example:
For a particular request to be completed the request
needs to have some tasks completed by the service desk and then the request is
sent off to an application support team for completion. The IT support team
operates Monday to Friday 9 to 5
Let’s suppose that this request came in towards the end
of the business day (4pm) and let’s assume that the first part takes 1 hour.
The service desk completes their piece and the request is sent off to the next
team. Of course everyone is going home for the day so the request is in the application
support queue. The first thing the next
morning the application team promptly completes the rest for the request within
the first hour. Once this is completed the application support team resolves
the request.
Theres a few ways to look at this:
·
That the request physically took two hours
·
From a customer perspective the request took
from 4pm until 10am the next morning – 18 hours
·
That potentially from a reporting perspective
the only team which gets credit for this request is the application support
team and they either get the 2 hours timing or 18 hours.
The challenge with this is to identify areas for
improvement within your queue management. It may look as though the service
desk whips through tickets as they are only working on and resolving their own
tickets. There may be no consideration (depending on your ticketing system) to
review the multi group components. On top of that there are teams who are
frustrated wishing for a “stop button” to only show what work that are
accountable for.
I understand that there are many companies who are
leveraging systems which account for this. However there are still others who
are not. Taking a good look at how you manage your delivery of service through
queue management will allow you to target areas within the escalation which may
need to be fine-tuned.
At the end of the day it is the customer experience which
we are looking to address. So whatever internal workarounds we need to employ
to make sure we can target the queue and escalation process for improvements,
we should strongly consider them.
I realize that this post is the tip of the iceberg and
that I didn’t touch on SLA’s or first call resolution and a few other items but I look forward to diving into
those in the next few posts. There are many areas, not just IT, who leverage
services in this way. Feel free to connect with me and let me know what has
worked well and where you are having some challenges.
Follow
me on Twitter
@ryanrogilvie or connect with me on LinkedIn
Labels: BRM, ITIL, ITSM, Service Delivery, service desk, Service Management