Measuring the health of you IT service team is an important indicator of customer satisfaction. You may want to know:
- How well is the team performing against their service level agreements
- How well is the team resolving incoming requests
The metrics will tell you the "what", which will make you want to know the "why."
You need reporting that can give you the metrics, but also provide you with context so you can better understand the measurements. Seeing the right metrics in the right context will help your
team come up with a plan to address any issues or problems based on data, not just hunches.
VisualScript is an Atlassian marketplace reporting application that has the flexibility to go from metrics to in context reports.
The focus of this article is to share four reports that will help you measure the health of your IT service desk by starting with the necessary metrics and then going to reports that provide context for those metrics.
Report 1: IT Service Desk Health
Understanding the overall health of your service desk can be measured by your performance against your service level agreements (SLAs).
Visualizing this overall across all SLAs, and by each individual SLA can paint the entire picture.
Using gauge reports where the needle and percentage reads how many opened tickets have breached SLA over a period of time can help provide a quick and easy way
to see how healthy your service desk is.
Adding additional gauges to report on each SLA can easily find one or more of your service level agreements that your service desk team might be
struggling with, and also one or more of your service level agreements that your service desk team is excelling in and should celebrate.
Report 2: Mean Time to Respond and Mean Time to Resolve
The health gauge gave you a good overview of the overall health of your service desk. Next, you may want to dive a little deeper and understand day to day performance over a period of time.
Two of the more important service level agreements in most service desks cover the mean time to respond and the mean time to resolve opened tickets.
You will want to see which SLA(s) are a problem and see where spikes occured.
The report is built using a simple pair of line charts, where the user can select the timeframe that is reported on.
It helps you to identify trends where the service desk is doing a great job and show days there was an issue that created a higher breach percentage.
With this report you can now identify the days there were problems, so you can dig into knowing why. In order to know why, we must better understand what the bottlenecks are in our process(es).
Report 3: Time in Status
What status in our service management workflow is the bottleneck? Where are our tickets being held up? A flowchart that shows the workflow of our
service requests can tell us which status our tickets sit in the longest on average.
Use the same time box as the two previous reports and you'll be able to see why you have a spike in a specific SLA. In our example, the spike occured because the ticket was sitting in a status where the transition that triggers the SLA to be met is taking a longer time then it should.
We can now try to understand if we have resource issues, or if we have more serious process issues that could use some level of optimization and/or automation.
Report 4: Opened vs Resolved Pie Chart
Measuring performance is not just based off of how our service desk team performs against service level agreements, but also how it performs in managing its workload.
Reporting on workload management can help team leaders make data-driven decisions around areas like staffing and training.
A pie chart that shows the number of tickets opened vs the number of tickets resolved can easily show if the team is able to resolve as many tickets as are opened over a period of time.
The closer to 50/50 this pie chart is, the better. That means our teams are resolving most tickets that are being opened on average.
If the resolved number is higher than the opened number of tickets, that is even better.
The goal is for our teams to get better and provide the best customer service we can.
If the opened number is higher than the resolved number of tickets, then we should be asking questions.
Adjusting the time box in the pie chart can help us identify smaller periods of time where the problem may have occurred.
We can then run an analysis on the types of requests that came in. Do the results of this analysis result in us needing to train our staff, hire more staff, or revisit our processes?
Summary
There are many great metrics that can be used by IT service management teams to measure their health.
The 4 reports shown in this article are just a few examples that can help teams understand how they are performing against their service level agreements,
as well as their workload over a defined period of time.
