One of the prime functions for problem
management is to ensure we reduce the number of incidents which re-occur. This
sounds like problem management would be an easy sell but in many organizations that
is not the case, why? Well, to begin with when we look at the initial value
that problem resolution brings to service management we are typically looking
at statistics. These stats unfortunately may have not the best spin with
regards to their optics. In other words they just don’t have that “wow factor attached
to them. This is primarily due to the fact that they are presented to
leadership in terms of volume. The truth is problem investigation might take
much longer and when we look at “last months problems” we see a low volume of
issues being worked on. We might see that last month the problem manager worked
on 4 problems and maybe resolved nothing. Doesn’t really blow people away when
you start to compete for attention with incidents that are restoring critical service
and has potentially hundreds of incidents over the same time frame which are
resolved.
Note:
these numbers have no value other than to show mathematics you can apply to
your organization
Priority
|
Volume
|
Duration (average)
|
Total Duration (minutes
|
1
|
100
|
4hrs
|
24000 mins
|
2
|
200
|
8hrs
|
96000 mins
|
3
|
700
|
24hrs
|
1008000 mins
|
Staff
|
Salary/Year
|
Cost/min*
|
People
|
Total Salary
|
Tier 1
|
50K
|
.40
|
10
|
500000
|
Tier 2
|
75K
|
.60
|
10
|
750000
|
Tier 3
|
100K
|
.80
|
10
|
1000000
|
*Based on 40hrs/week and 52 weeks per year
If we were to suggest that each incident
requires the following:
2 Tier 1 @ 0.40/min = .80/min
2 Tier 2 @ 0.60/min = 1.20/min
1 Tier 3 @ 0.80/min
Reduce
re-occurring incidents
As anyone can attest to, when you have an issue
with any product more than once your patience begins to dwindle. Business
customers are no different than any other consumer. Aside from a reduction in
the number of incidents each month there is also an improved customer
experience.
Even if we were to make a simple Incident
reduction in priority one incidents by 10% we would be left with 90 incidents.
Providing that nothing else changes the total duration (in min) would be 21600.
The cost for this would be 2.80(21600) =
60480.00 per year which is a savings of $6720.00
Improved
first call resolution
Increasing first call resolution allows you to
reduce the escalation of incidents to other support teams as well as improving
the incident duration and improving the customer experience. As you may
remember from the post regarding incident ROI we had several costs associated
to escalation of incidents.
Let’s say that we shot for a 10% reduction in
incidents though problem, eliminated the need for calling Tier 3 and cut the
need for Tier 2 in half 1.40(21600)=
$30240.00 which is an overall savings of $36960.00 from the original 67200.00
for the priority 1 incidents if nothing was done.
If you were to take that back to the people
reading your reports your small amount of problems start to show high levels of
value.
Some activities will attribute to first call
resolution or a reduction in incidents which may not have a quantifiable
amount. For example if you were to have access to a knowledge repository where
people can source out information for themselves rather than emailing or
calling the service desk allows people to answer their own questions. Quite
often they are doing this now on a personal level each day. So why not position
the knowledge that you capture to be shared, where appropriate, to your
business. Positioning yourself to plan ahead you should be able to track activity
and maybe even usefulness so that you will be able to quantify the data being
leveraged in these areas for future ROI on knowledge records.
Again doing nothing will ensure that no
improvements are made. Start small, review what you’ve done and communicate
that you are doing it.
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Labels: Continual Service Improvement, ITIL, ITSM, Problem Management, Service Management