Technician performance: Finding the right balance
Zero open requests! IT managers would love for their managerial dashboard to tell them that there are zero open requests remaining at the end of the day. But this preoccupation with zero prevents managers from evaluating technicians fairly, often driving techs to resolve more and more requests quickly.
I recently came across a help desk run by a healthcare firm that was able to close 50 requests per day with just 10 technicians. Now compare this with a software firm that has the same number of technicians but can close only about 10 requests per day. Does this imply the technicians at the software firm are slacking off?
As each help desk receives a different set of IT requests, ranging from password resets to data center migrations, it's important that help desk managers get a fair understanding of technician performance by monitoring not only the number of open requests, but also other related metrics.
This post provides an overview of several reports that can help you obtain a deeper understanding of technician performance, as well as empower you with the right data to make business-critical decisions on staffing, training, and resource re-distribution.
1. Open and closed requests by technician
From a technician’s perspective, it can be frustrating to be reprimanded for a backlog of requests and not be complimented for the volumes of requests closed. As a result, technicians close requests prematurely or hesitate to pick up new requests to keep their open request count low.
A better way to keep tabs on technician productivity is to monitor open requests alongside closed requests for each technician. This will let you make a fair assessment of how much work each technician has completed against what's pending. The report below allows you to objectively compare the performance of a technician who's closed 30 requests and has seven open requests against another technician who's closed 17 requests and has only two open requests.
2. Open requests age tier by technician
The primary concern around open requests is time. The longer a request is left open, the more likely there is an underlying problem with the technician’s performance. The ticket ageing report places open requests in specific age tiers, say 0-15 days, 15-30 days, 30-45 days, and more than 45 days, giving you a comprehensive view of technician performance. This makes it easy to pinpoint technicians who have too many open requests for too long, indicating that may be slacking off, as well as technicians who have quite a few fresh requests open (15 days or less) indicating that they may just be busy.
3. Technician-wise reopened requests
In a bid to close more requests quickly, technicians sometimes close requests before resolving them fully, resulting in those requests being reopened by the end user. In such cases, the best thing for the help desk to do is keep a close eye on the request reopens, and take that into account while assessing performance.
I'd highly recommend that you look into this metric as a percentage rather than absolute numbers, because percentages gives you a better understanding of the true extent of the problem and allow you to compare performance objectively.
4. Escalated requests by technician
Similar to request reopens, it's important to analyze escalated requests. This helps zero in on technicians who are unable to handle the requests that are assigned to them on their own, or those technicians that provide unsatisfactory solutions to end users. Keeping tabs on escalated requests is a useful way to identify technicians who aren't performing satisfactorily.
5. SLA compliance levels by technician
SLAs are important because they define the standards for “good” service, making them a great yardstick for measuring technician performance. Monitoring how different technicians adhere to SLA compliance levels can give you a good idea of their performance. One look at a report showing technicians and the percentage of requests resolved within SLAs can help you pin down technicians failing to meet those standards, hinting that there's a need for additional help or training.
To conclude, when assessing a technician's performance, it would be erroneous to look only at their number of open/pending/backlogged/unfinished requests. A better option is to look at the holistic picture, focus on realistic metrics, and recognize technicians for their achievements to further incentivize them to provide quality solutions to end users.
Curious to explore more reports? Check out our online demo page, log in as an administrator, and create reports and dashboards using our sample data.
