A perfect example
I’ve mentioned before why I think measuring the effectiveness of your help desk folks by looking at the number of tickets they work alone is dumb. This week, I had a perfect example.
We had one of our pool laptops lose a hard drive this week. The replacement drive came in Thursday late in the day, so I set out Friday morning to swap the drive and start the process of installing Windows XP and all the various device drivers, getting all the updates, installing Office and all the other extraneous software (A-V, VPN, Adobe Reader, etc.) that our users might require when traveling with this laptop.
I also answered a few help desk calls/emails while this process was ongoing, but, obviously, not nearly as many as the other people working the help desk that day. If you pulled a report from our help desk software for that day, it’d look like maybe I didn’t do as much work as the other folks, when, in fact, I probably did more. It just so happens that one of my tickets was an all-day project. If we were using number of tickets as an important metric, I wouldn’t have focused on getting this laptop done, and available for our users, I would have focused on closing more tickets, because that’s what I’m being measured by.
On the other hand, I know what was better use of my time in terms of providing support, and that wasn’t worrying about the number of tickets I worked.
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On the other side of the coin, you can look at number of per user initiated tickets to see who needs training, pc replacement or a “think for yourself – press F1” sticker placed at the top of the monitor đŸ™‚
Andy, I totally agree, there are lots of good reasons to track the number of tickets being handled, you gave one great example and you certainly want to have an understanding of what sort of workflow your people are dealing with too. It’s just not the only way to measure productivity. đŸ™‚
Wow, someone who agrees! I guess the grunts are really the only ones who get this concept, because management sure doesn’t.
I once deployed 15 computers in six hours (already imaged), and had to clean up after my boss who ‘helped’ by improperly connecting the ethernet, and who later had the nerve to ask me why I was doing fewer tickets than our other tech.
Our other tech had recently had surgery and as such was handling “easy” calls, like account resets and the like, but somehow, this obvious fact missed him completely. He was gone a month later.