The balancing act: Technicians vs Tickets
When it comes to the help desk, we can and often do, measure all kinds of metrics. But one question that always lingers is: Do I have enough technicians to handle all my requests? or, do I have too many technicians? There are a wide range of reports that can help you understand the ratio of tickets vs technicians, and verify the balance between the two.
1. Ticket volume vs number of active technicians
Looking at the distribution of technicians and tickets by month, will give you a good idea of the kind of workload cut out for youtechnicians. A fairly balanced workload would have a fixed number of technicians handling an evenly distributed workload.
If you look at the graph below, you can say that the workload is fairly balanced. You have 5 technicians to handle 900-1100 tickets a month, which is a pretty good number for a help desk. Since this is subject to the nature and complexity of tickets, a combination of this report with the following one (Avg number of tickets resolved by each technician) should help.
2. Average number of tickets resolved by each technician
This report will help you understand the number tickets each of your technicians can handle in a month. Compare this value with the average number of incoming tickets you receive each month. If both these totals match, then your help desk has the right number of technicians to handle tickets, but if your ticket count is higher, it might be time to consider hiring more support staff.
From the above graph, you can infer that each of the technicians handle roughly about 100-120 tickets a month. Now, you can compare this value with the ticket volume to see if you're adequately staffed.
3. Nature of tickets - incident vs service requests
An incident ticket is unplanned work - a break/fix issue, while a service request is a pre-approved service that the help desk offers to end users. Naturally, incident tickets have a greater impact on business continuity. This is why it's important to study the number of incident and service requests separately.
As seen in this graph, if incident tickets are more than service tickets, then it's best to have dedicated front-line staff ready to handle incident tickets as and when they occur to help cut-down on lost productivity.
4. Tickets that go inactive after the first response time
Tickets are classified as active or inactive in terms of the time they were last worked upon. You can also base first response time as a metric to calculate inactive or stale tickets. Stale tickets are often a result of poorly managed ticket queue but they could also indicate overburden on technicians. A robust help desk cannot have a large number of tickets that go untouched for long periods of time.
Here's a report that can help you see how many stale tickets you have: For your reference, we are considering all tickets that are open for more than 60 days as stale or inactive tickets.
In the graph given above, the number of stale or inactive tickets seem quite high. But before you get into the fire-fighting mode, you need to take into account the size of the organization, the number of employees and the number of employees. For a large organization with about 2000+ employees, this might not be an alarming figure.
5. Trend of SLA violation
One reason why tickets violate SLA is a lack of technicians to handle these tickets. While you cannot claim lack of technicians as the only reason for SLA violations, a recurring pattern of violations every time there in an increase in incoming ticket volume hints towards a technician-ticket volume imbalance.
From this graph, you can tell that the number of SLA violations is more when there is a spike in ticket volume, indicating that recruiting additional staff can provide a solution to reduce SLA violations.
These are some simple yet useful graphs that can help you stack number of technical staff against workload. Comment in the section below to share your thoughts on how you weigh your help desk staff against ticket volumes.
You can also check out our demo page for more interesting reports and dashboards that can help you build a super-charged and balanced workforce.