Priority Reports for Support Teams

One of the greatest frustrations of customers and help desk associates alike is when a help case must be escalated outside of the help desk. These are the requests that fall into a black hole. The customer calls up regularly to inquire about the status. The help desk contacts the support technician assigned to the case for a status. The customer is frustrated because the delay is affecting her work. The technician is frustrated because there are so many support, project, and operational tasks assigned to him. The help desk is caught in between these two and is usually powerless to help either.

This is one of the most important areas for help desk leaders to address. Implementing processes and tools that prioritize support tasks will benefit the support technicians, the help desk analysts, and even the customers. This month's tool is a prioritization matrix that the help desk publishes and distributes to the support teams and internally to the service desk.

The support priority matrix works on the assumptions that: 1) everyone is busy; 2) there's too much work to get done; and 3) customers are frustrated by not knowing when their help cases will be resolved. By publishing a matrix to the level 2 or level 3 support teams that sets the priority for each case and tracks progress with a service level objective or agreement, everyone can see how there doing in providing support services to your customers.

This matrix should be published and distributed daily to support:

• elimination of zombie cases (requests that have been sitting so long that even the customer has forgotten)
• reduction of average resolution time
• customer inquiries about their help case status
• relief for support staff, who can work on requests in order rather than being overwhelmed with all of them
• proper staff support resource assignment by managers
• objective communication of service level performance
• healthy competition among teams to minimize queue sizes or red lights

The matrix is generated either by or from your help desk management system. If your system does not support this, it can also be accomplished in Microsoft Excel or Access. It should be a spreadsheet format that consists of the following columns:


Informational Columns

• Case number
• Case type/category
• Case description
• Customer name
• Status
• Last modification date
• Date created

Calculated Columns

• Age of request (today's date minus the date created)
• Service level expectations (based on type of request)
• Priority (automatically calculated using the age of request, the SLA, and any other factors that are important)
• Red, Yellow, or Green light (where red has exceeded SLA, yellow is approaching SLA, and green has comfortable margin)

The requests listed in these columns should be grouped by the support team to which each case is assigned. The support team may be displayed as a header for each section of the report.

To enhance this report, include a bar chart that shows each support team's queue with separate sub-bars for red, yellow, and green cases. This will allow a quick comparison of workload and service level performance by team and will motivate teams to look good on the report.

Help cases come in fast, and priorities may change rapidly, so it is essential that you generate this report daily. As with any help desk report, automate it right away. If you can't automate it, you will probably stop reporting on it within three weeks.

Supplement your report with a daily review meeting. This will allow support team managers to communicate any delays or issues with high priority cases. Peer exposure will also motivate them to keep up with their cases.

Manage priorities well, and you'll please everyone who interacts with your help desk.

Help Desk Performance in a Single Chart

One of the challenges in measuring the performance of any support team is to create a meaningful view of performance. Although it is not possible in a single chart to capture all of the facets of peformance, there is one chart that provides a great monthly peformance dashboard.

This chart, shown below, provides a look at the backlog of open support cases at the beginning of a month, the number of new cases received, the number of cases resolved during the month, and the average turnaround time for the resolved cases.



With the first bar, the backlog of open cases, you can see if your backlog is higher than expected. You can also see if what you are doing to reduce backlog is effective by looking for a downward trend in this measurement each month.

The second bar, new cases this month, shows the trend of your case volume, to see if you are experiencing heavier support request volume. You can use this to adjust by reassigning resources or changing processes to shift workload of certain types of cases.

The third bar, cases resolved, shows the actual cases resolved during the month. This provides an at-a-glance measurement to see if you are working through backlog, only completing new requests, or adding more to your backlog by completing less than your new requests.

The line represents case turn around time for the given month. With this, you can see if you are improving, staying the same, or getting worse at resolving cases in a timely manner. It provides enough information to see if you want to drill down deeper to isolate problem areas.

This chart requires a little bit of work to create the first time, but after you have created it, you can reuse it easily.

1. Using Microsoft® Excel, create a data table like the one below.



	A	B	C	D	E
1	Date	Backlog	New	Resolved	Turnaround
2	1/1/2006	500	800	820	5.5
3	2/1/2006	480	823	873	5
4	3/1/2006	430	750	779	4.9
5	4/1/2006	401	830	881	4.8
6	5/1/2006	350	1,144	944	5
7	6/1/2006	550	900	1,100	4.5
8	7/1/2006	350	810	840	4.5
9	8/1/2006	320	795	905	4.2
10	9/1/2006	210	750	780	3.7
11	10/1/2006	180	810	840	3.5
12	11/1/2006	150	880	875	3
13	12/1/2006	155	700	800	2.5



2. Select the values from A1 through E13.


3. Select Chart from the Insert menu.


4. Select a column chart, using the default column chart format, and click Finish.


5. Right click on one of the columns in the Turnaround series and select Format Data Series.


6. On the Axis tab, select the SecondaryAxis radio button and click Ok.


7. Right click once again on one of the columns in the Turnaround series and select Chart Type.


8. From the Standard Types tab, click on Line, using the default line chart format, and click Finish.


9. The mechanics of your chart are done. Now right click on the background of the chart and select Chart Options to add titles and change the format.

Now your chart is finished! This chart works well as a stand alone spreadsheet or as part of an Access database report.

-Steve McElwee