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Posted: Fri Feb 11, 2005 12:11 am Post subject: ITIL Service Desk Metrics
I am trying to find any ITIL METRICS we can use to calculate staffing numbers for a Help Desk Project I am working on for the government. Does anyone know of any industry standard formulas for doing this. My user community is about 10,000.
-how many help desk calls per hour can we expect
-how many trouble tickets per hour can one person close
-how many systems/accounts can one sys admin manage
-how many helpdesk people are required for 1 site?
-how many users can 1 sys admin support?
Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.
I am still a newbie, but from what I know, ITIL Metrics would not help you figure out the potential capacity for your Service Desk.
What I have seen of ITIL metrics, are just numbers that you can watch, to really be able to measure the success of your process improvement initiative.
Like, % Incidents solved at first line support, or % of dropped calls, or things of that nature.
I may be wrong, but I don't think ITIL can answer the questions you have.
Posted: Tue Aug 09, 2005 2:42 pm Post subject: Re: ITIL Service Desk Metrics
funky1 wrote:
I am trying to find any ITIL METRICS we can use to calculate staffing numbers for a Help Desk Project I am working on for the government. Does anyone know of any industry standard formulas for doing this. My user community is about 10,000.
-how many help desk calls per hour can we expect
-how many trouble tickets per hour can one person close
-how many systems/accounts can one sys admin manage
-how many helpdesk people are required for 1 site?
-how many users can 1 sys admin support?
Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.
Regards,
Tony
Tony,
This is a very difficult question and depends of the skill of the enduser. When you handle calls of end users with no skill it can last up to one hour to solve a serious problem.
Most problems are connection problems, when people start working. Connection problems is common knowledge for Service Desk. You can handle this kind of call in two or three minutes from beginning to closure of the call.
Then there is the Software you use. Can work slower installed on Servers, can cost a lot of effort to get it running at proper speed. Operating Systems, virus, E-mail servers clustered on a moment that a Hard Disk is almost full and clients are logging in etc.
Hard to say. But one guy can solve the problem. It costs time ofcorse and in this time he cannot handle another call. etc.
We handle 50 servers per operator. A little to much, 30 would be more than enough. But it can be done with some luck. I do not know how many endusers are connected at those 50 servers. We have an appointment that end users may never call Service Desk. Only a person with proper knowledge about PC or OS can call, to avoid fishing at the ROOT problem.
Joined: Sep 08, 2005 Posts: 2 Location: Washington, USA
Posted: Fri Sep 09, 2005 12:06 pm Post subject:
Six Sigma is your "best practice" from a metric and reporting standard.
For service desk or inbound centers:
AHT - Average Handle Time
SL - Calls answered w/in a specific time.
ASA - Average Speed of Answer
Inbound Calls - Total Daily
Control Lines with Trending and process shifts and/or Control Charts with Average and Range are very telling. If you have the luxury of working in a business with a customer care organization...see if you can utulize their instance of EFW (eworkforce management) for scheduling. Work with your telecom people to pull call data off your PBX/IVR and identify someone to help pull the data together for presentment.
Once you get a handle a calls you can look to merge ticketing data with your call data for FCR and Productivity reports.
Good Luck
[Edited. Reason for edit: Removal of external link] _________________ "When music and courtesy are better understood and appreciated, there will be no war" - Confucius
Gartner reckon about 1.2 incidents per user per month
this should give you around 12000 incidents a month
Calls per hour will be dependant on the incoming contact methods for the desk if you have e-mail or a web front end/. calls will be lower.
If we take the worse case scenario that phonecalls are you're only contact method, you need to calculate how many working hours there are in a month and then divide 12000 by that figure.
If you're contacts are simple queries and you have a good knowledge strategy you can log and close at point of contact , i'd estimate 10 minutes per call to log, diagnose and close(variable depending on the complexity of your service) - 6 tickets per person per hour
Admin accounts per admin staff - depends how resilient the database is and the time of year, after the summer / christmas holidays evryone usually forgets their passwords so the volumes of calls will be high
Systems/ accounts supportable, depends on the skill of the resource and the reliability of the systems
helpdesk people per site - depends on how many users per site
What you're looking for is some magic bullet that will indicate the relative workload that your team will required to support.
There are many factors that contribute not only to the volume of work, but also to the nature of the work. For instance troubleshooting an application issue usually takes longer and require more resource than resetting a password.
My advice is to:
1. carry out a volumetric analysis on the systems that are currently supported
2. Understand (and agree) with the business stakeholders what services are important to them in terms of cost, capability and reputation, should these service not be available-and here's where ITIL comes in to it - draft and agree a service catalogue with the customer that shows what's supported, when it's supported, and how well it's supported (e.g. Category A rather than Category B system). Only when the team knows what they support, and what there priorities are, can resouces be applied.
The outcome from this is a better understanding of what sort of support needs to be provided, and from this flows indications of the resourcing required to deliver this. It sound a bit hard basket I know, however it's the only effectiove way! Try it - you'll see huge benefits arising from this, such as:
-Foundation for establihing a Service Delivery and Management framework
-Improved customer rapport
-Proactive dialogue
-Justification for increased funding/resources (or not!)
What you're looking for is some magic bullet that will indicate the relative workload that your team will required to support.
There are many factors that contribute not only to the volume of work, but also to the nature of the work. For instance troubleshooting an application issue usually takes longer and require more resource than resetting a password.
My advice is to:
1. carry out a volumetric analysis on the systems that are currently supported
2. Understand (and agree) with the business stakeholders what services are important to them in terms of cost, capability and reputation, should these service not be available-and here's where ITIL comes in to it - draft and agree a service catalogue with the customer that shows what's supported, when it's supported, and how well it's supported (e.g. Category A rather than Category B system). Only when the team knows what they support, and what there priorities are, can resouces be applied.
The outcome from this is a better understanding of what sort of support needs to be provided, and from this flows indications of the resourcing required to deliver this. It sound a bit hard basket I know, however it's the only effectiove way! Try it - you'll see huge benefits arising from this, such as:
-Foundation for establihing a Service Delivery and Management framework
-Improved customer rapport
-Proactive dialogue
-Justification for increased funding/resources (or not!)
Joined: Mar 14, 2005 Posts: 26 Location: Brussels, Belgium
Posted: Wed Sep 28, 2005 2:52 am Post subject: Erlang Formula
I am by no means an expert but as far as I know the Erlang Formula is used widely to estimate staffing needs.
Usually the formula is applied to 15min intervals.
You can find a lot of information here ..
[no links please]
Joined: May 27, 2005 Posts: 79 Location: Madrid-Spain
Posted: Wed Sep 28, 2005 6:03 pm Post subject: More about Erlang
Thanks Wolfhard for the link,it is really good for Service Desk.
A free erlang calculator to estimate the number of helpdeskers requied could be downoladed from 3w.erlang.com
From my experience designing helpdesk, sometimes results obtained by Erlang should be reviewed and adjust but I fully agree with Wolfhard Erlang Distribution is a very good aproach.
Joined: Mar 04, 2008 Posts: 1883 Location: Newcastle-under-Lyme
Posted: Thu Jul 23, 2009 7:21 pm Post subject:
Oh no!
Not a phishing attack?
A classic example of a self-referential post? _________________ "Method goes far to prevent trouble in business: for it makes the task easy, hinders confusion, saves abundance of time, and instructs those that have business depending, both what to do and what to hope."
William Penn 1644-1718
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