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IT Incident Management System Metrics

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What is an effective incident management system? Taking action to restore normal service operation quickly while minimizing negative impact on business operations. Managing incidents effectively is an essential piece for providing quality customer support. This can also help teams improve their current operations to prevent future incidents.

Benefits of an effective incident management system:

  1. Increased productivity and efficiency
  2. Higher level of service quality
  3. Visibility and transparency
  4. Valuable IT service management documentation
  5. Enhance end user satisfaction

The self-service portal is the single point of contact for the users to report any incidents. IT responds, handles, and resolves any request or issue to the business and/or customers depending upon what both parties think about impact and urgency. Then the incident is designated to staff that can best resolve it.

Incident Management Metrics 

There are 3 major factors through which an incident order is decided upon: Impact, urgency, and priority.

Impact – How a business is affected by an incident?

Urgent – How urgent the incident is and how much time it will take to be resolved? 

Priority – What is the priority of the incident ? (Low, Medium or High)

5 steps of incident management:

  1. Incident Reporting  communication begins at the time an incident is identified to acknowledge to the user or business that a disruption is taking place and investigation is in progress.
  2. Incident Escalation occurs when an incident triggers an alert and the proper procedures are performed by the individual who is assigned to manage the incident.
  3. Investigation and Diagnosis IT team performs analysis, then staff can begin investigating the type, cause, and possible solutions for an incident.
  4. Resolution and Recovery  involve eliminating root causes of issues and restoring systems to full functioning. Resolving an incident also includes documenting analysis findings and steps taken to restore service.
  5. Incident Closure communicating and confirming from users that the service experience is normalized ensuring customer satisfaction is met.

How to Measure Service Level Agreements

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As an IT Manager, you are tasked with developing to measure Service Level Agreements, (SLA), understanding compliance to the SLA and taking corrective action when violations occur. Help Desk systems create significant volumes of “dark data” that, when mined, provide insight critical to achieving organizational service and customer satisfaction objectives.

Let’s look at the types of information you can use to measure service level agreements.

We can consider that there are different reporting objectives when measuring SLAs.

  1. Customer specific – did we meet our goals?
  2. Staff centric – how are our team performing and are there any trends that are contributing to SLA violations?
  3. System-centric – are there patterns in your IT stack that are creating an abnormal trend in SLA violations?

Ideally, you will isolate six to twelve metrics that will help you answer the questions above.  Here are some examples for you:

Customer specific metrics:

  • reaction time,
  • resolution time,
  • compliance to agreed deadlines

Staff centric metrics:

  • Abandonment Rate: Percentage of calls abandoned while waiting to be answered.
  • ASA (Average Speed to Answer): Average time (usually in seconds) it takes for a call to be answered by the service desk.
  • TSF (Time Service Factor): Percentage of calls answered within a definite time frame, e.g., 80% in 20 seconds.
  • FCR (First-Call Resolution): Percentage of incoming calls that can be resolved without the use of a callback or without having the caller call back the help desk to finish resolving the case.
  • TAT (Turn-Around Time): Time taken to complete a certain task.
  • MTTR (Mean Time To Recover): Time taken to recover after an outage of service.

We have reviewed what to measure now let’s cover the how to measure aspect.

Of course, if you have a tool that will pull all this data together for you into a single view, then that is the ideal.  However, if not, then here are some critical considerations for you:

  1. Keep the number of metrics small, six to twelve, no more. If you have too much information, it will be difficult to wade through and challenging for anyone to assemble regularly.  Too many metrics could lead to the abandonment of this important process.
  2. Trend the data over a period. I suggest that you have thirteen weeks of data to compare and graph.
  3. Because you want to see how performance is comparing to the goal, make sure that you put the goal beside the metric.
  4. Incorporate this report into you weekly team Traction Meeting and use it to identify SLA, team or IT issues. See Six Ways to Strengthen your IT Organization.

Entry Software has been working with IT organizations since 1998 and can help you develop your Service Level Agreements, and provide you with the information you need to measure them.  Learn more about their integrated help desk and project management solution, TeamHeadquarters or get a demo of TeamHeadquarters today.

The Business Benefit of a Service Level Agreement

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Recently I met with a client specializing in the delivery of high-speed internet to residential and commercial customers. I was invited to help develop a customer retention and acquisition strategy.  The firm needed a way to differentiate their company from the competitors so that the clients wouldn’t jump ship when their contract expired.  They also needed a way to attract new customers and felt that the service their company provided was superior to that of the competitors. They asked me my thoughts on this, and I recommended that we evaluate the use of Service Level Agreements to keep clients and to attract new ones. [Read more…] about The Business Benefit of a Service Level Agreement

IT Management | Strategic Thinking

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An IT manager called me the other day and says, “What can you do to help me achieve my IT strategy?” Great question, says I; tell me your strategy, and I will see how I can help.

The next five minutes I had to endure metaphors, vaguenesses, and I saw it was coming, “I do not have a defined and written down strategy” (aka, I have no idea what a strategy is but it sounded impressive didn’t it), realization moment.  Can you say, “Awkward?”

How do you help someone who knows they need help, yet is unclear about why and how?  You ask questions.

[Read more…] about IT Management | Strategic Thinking