Afteroon
So I have recently started a new job where one of my responsibilities is the management of 27 sys admins. The overall management of these is one problem, but being dealt with by reducing direct reports and implementing 1:1's etc.
The problem that I am seeking opinion on, is the best way to have visibility and reporting capabilities of the BAU and reactive support work that the team are involved in. Projects and associated tasks are reported on and easily tracked. I have come from an organisation were Kanban was used, but this may be a step too far for my new organisation just yet as they are somewhat 'set in their ways' . The service desk use a ticketing system, but I am not sure that this is the right way either. In a nutshell I am looking for feedback or opinion on:
1. A good way for recording BAU and support tasks that provide me with a snapshot of what is being done, and arguably more important, what is not being done.
2. If possible, i want to be able to report on this to help make cases for additional resource etc.
Any help appreciated
Simon
it's all about the metrics
Welcome to my world... I'm in pretty much the same position you're in -- managing a team of support sysadmins, whose primary mission is to respond to customer-generated tickets (and monitoring alerts). I've been doing it for about 6 months now (I've worked as a support sysadmin for going on 10 years prior to that).
The only saving grace is that everything (well, nearly everything -- I'm working on that) goes through the ticketing system. Hence I have a *fairly* good idea of the workload of both individuals and the team as a whole over time, including response times (how long it takes for someone to reply to a customer), resolution time, number of tickets in a given state at a given time (and owned by a given person), and so on.
While I'm well aware of the dangers of "managing by metrics" (people working to make the metrics look good, not to make the company look good), I do believe that knowing all the numbers gives me two big and valuable things:
* An "early warning" into productivity issues, which means I can look into the ticket history and see what's going on; and
* Data to back up my assertion that I need more staff.
The latter is where this data is going to prove it's worth, I think. If the numbers clearly show that (for instance) response times are going up when the ticket load goes above a certain point, that's a reasonable indicator that we've reached some sort of productivity plateau, and it might be worth adding some more people to the tickets team. Naturally, that isn't the only possibility I'll be considering, but it's much easier to justify "I think we need a new person" if I can show that ticket volumes are up 40% than if I just say "I feel it in my waters that we're doing more work".
Timesheets
Get your team to produce timesheets in 15 minute blocks.
My development team needed to do this to provide out to our PMO team (mainly to measure efforts on specific projects against expected).
The important thing here is that it is an iterative process which needs to refined as you go (don't try and get everything from the start otherwise you will just over engineer and never do anything.
For me (I'm sure this list can be add others), your directs time is taken up with:
I've found this data useful for my own usage of time - regardless of the team. Firstly it focussed my time - I use a piece of A4 in 15 minute blokcs - if I'm looking at it saying what have I done for the last 2 hours - then somewhere I've lost focus. Secondly, on a weekly or monthly then I can see if I am getting a healthy split between the categories.
From a department level you soon learn how much you are spending on the various efforts. You can then ask to drill down further if you need - for example you may have 4 or 5 BAU sub-categories. BAU is always a brilliant category to try and reduce. Most of BAU activity hasn't been questioned forever.
I'm afraid this isn't an easy one to implement as no-one likes doing timesheets - but if you can get this into place it becomes something you can KPI and report on monthly. You can then use to target team/ individuals and use for justification to your boss.
Hope this helps.