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Objective:
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The ability to provide good-quality management information shows a level of maturity within your support organisation. When you first build a support organisation, you may have little formal reporting in place. As you mature in your support processes, you will see an expanding need to report on and clearly understand request histories, trends and workloads. Management information is often the only method available adequately to justify additional resources and expenditure.
Reporting, however, is often subjective and needs to be focused on business improvement. It is important that results are not just filed away but used as an essential business tool to justify, develop and continually improve the service.
Receiving reports is essential not only for Customers but also for all the teams contributing to the service-provision process, with each team requiring the information in different ways. For example:
The most valuable and expensive resource within your support operation is your staff. Optimising staff utilisation is of primary importance. Workload analysis can help determine staffing levels, when staff are needed, and how work patterns vary from day-to-day, or even week-to-week.
Accurate support-staff and third-party workload analyses need to take into account the complete request life-cycle and the time spent during each phase. For detailed analysis, support staff should enter the time they spend working on a request or any part of it. For example a request may be logged and closed by the Service Desk; however, during its life-cycle, persons from other support groups may have spent time working on the request. Therefore each individual's elapsed time and actual time spent needs to be accounted for and reported on.
Figure 4.11 gives an example of a single request, which took four hours to complete. In the given scenario, we may wish to know whether the 'Third-Party Engineer' exceeded his or her Service Level Agreement, as well as the actual Customer Incident. In the same situation we may also wish to know how long a request may spend in a specific status, priority etc.
| Support Group | Duration |
| Service Desk | 10 min |
| PC Support | 1 hr 50 min |
| Third Party Engineer | 1 hr 30 min |
| Service Desk | 30 min |
Figure 4.11 - Incident workload analysis
Workload analysis is an important tool for identifying SLA and OLA target achievement.
An organisation should establish a suitable frequency of reporting and review, depending upon the importance of the review. Providing results in graphical form is useful for presenting management overviews on major areas of interest.
To provide a common service objective, it is important that all members of the service team are aware of the major issues, concerns, performance levels and achievements of the whole team and not just their specific group.
Suggested review periods and levels are set out below.
These should report:
These should highlight:
These should report on:
Reporting, whether online or in textual form, is also essential for proactive support at the Service Desk. Consider the following reports to aid this:
As time progresses, the total number of Service Desk Incident records logged will increase. The question of when and what to archive is based on several considerations, including:
Retention of information relating to quarterly and annual Incidents should be carefully considered. It may be the case that the last time this job ran was a year ago, and therefore any Problems found and their solutions will only have been registered during that period, if not subsequently corrected via Change Management.
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