Backlog Target Levels

[FarmWhippet]

We have been successfully managing our Backlog levels down since applying the ITIL ideas, but I was wondering if there is an acceptable Backlog level.

Clearly, it is not possible to not have any tickets open when you have a user base of 7000+, but is there a number of open tickets that is deemed reasonable based on the number of users?

Any ideas on this would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Roz

[sherlock]

Depends on what 'tickets' you are focussing: problem or incident records.

There will always be problems, remaining in 'open' state, if you don't want to focus on those problems, haven't defined a root cause, have a decent workaround,...


For incident records, as long as you reach x% of your target levels of agreed services (e.g. low priority 95% closed within 5 days), you're doing fine. Try not to focus on just open incidents, but also the number wrt leading time, time to resolve,...

Here we got to support 12000 users. More than 500 tickets are logged daily, and there are daily 100-200 open tickets. Sounds threatening? No, first of all it's a point in time (momentum) which you will always have. Just keep an eye on the evolution of those open tickets by priority and measure of they get closed within you expected timeframe.


Hope this helps you on focussing to the correct indicators