Opening Support jobs as it comes in

[fto222]

Hello,

I'm sorry if this has been posted before but was wondering if any one can shed some light here.

With ITIL in mind, do you open support jobs as it comes in?
As in a logger logs a job in the logging system and it stays as new until some one at the service desk opens the call.
Even if the person isn't actively working on the issue do you still open the call to acknowledge to the user that the call has been accepted?

If this is the case then how do you assess how long the task took to resolve?

I have been doing this at my work and realised that I can't work out how long the staff has been taking to resolve a lot of the issues because after acknowledging the call they come back and resolve the call with descriptions, so I have no idea how long the actual issue took to resolve.

Any ideas?

Thank you for your help in advance

[Diarmid]

Hi,

I'm not sure whether you are asking about elapsed time for the call or for the task.

You need to measure the time from the call is raised until it is closed satisfactorily. To do this you have to open the incident/request on receipt. That is the time the user experiences and if you have SLAs that is the time to be measured for the SLA.

If you want to know (and you do) how much work time the job costs, then your technicians must record their time to that job.

If you want to know how much time the job takes to work through the system, then you need to record start times for things like assigned or placed in queue, allocated to start work, ready for checking with user, etc.

Your service desk software should allow you to have a whole string of status types that a call will go through allowing you to break down your analysis as you want.

You also have to understand how you deal with "dead time", such as out of work hours, waiting for response from user or waiting for third party supplier.
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[fto222]

Thank you,
I was after the ITIL's best practice... forgotten....

The system we use at my work are quite premitive and doesn't do a lot.
Contains a lot of info in the database but don't extract out nearly as much as we can. So...

But thank you, that's what I needed to know.

Thank you once again,