Time Track to Identify Hotspots

I haven't met a support analyst, yet, who likes to enter tickets into tracking systems. This practice, however, is a necessity for support teams. Consider it a necessary evil, if you will. In fact, all support staff needs to understand that ticketing is just part of their responsibilities. Now, that doesn't mean we shouldn't explain why ticketing is necessary to analysts. With this post, I plan to explain the need for ticketing.

In my mind, time tracking's biggest benefit is to help with identify support hotspots.

Time tracking should tell us things like:

1. How much time teams are spending with incidents?
2. How much time teams are spending doing service requests?
3. How much time are teams spending on change requests?
4. Which applications utilize most of the support bandwidth?
5. Which application components the biggest offenders?
6. Are there recurring issues which should be corrected?
7. Are there recurring service requests which should be automated (e.g. reports)?

Deep diving into the time tracking data, to get the answers to those questions, will provide insight into which areas should be the focus of stability programs. Deep dive sessions, where tickets should be reviewed for trends and correlated with availability numbers, should be programmed to occur regularly (I suggest at least quarterly) Once the various hotspots are identified, problem tickets should be opened for follow up actions (more on Problem Management in my next post).

Time tracking is also important for metrics and reporting purposes. In fact, time tracking is the basis for metrics and reporting. We can't report unless we're keeping track of issues and how they're affecting system availability. Important things to report on are:

1. Availability metrics
2. Top Talker incidents: These are the incidents which caused the most impact to availability
3. Incident counts
4. Service request counts
5. Change request counts
6. Support effort expended

Why do we even care about metrics and reporting? We care because we can't fix it, if we don't know if it's broken. Support teams can't work on "hunches" and need to focus their attention on true problems. If you can't measure it, you really can't fix it.

Finally, let's not be naive. Support is a cost center, and many senior managers are interested in making sure that support teams are staffed only with the necessary folks. Why spend the extra dollars, if we can't justify the expense. So at lest one point of time tracking is to justify staffing needs. For support managers, it also helps forecast future staffing needs as the application changes (which can mean an increase or decrease in staff).