Question 8
Scenario
Brewster’s is a toy factory that has been in business for 30 years. The company started with a small family run shop and has grown consistently over the years.
They are now supplying toy stores nationwide and are considered to be the primary supplier of children’s collectable novelty erasers.
Brewster’s IT department is relatively small (currently 15 staff) but efficient. They have recently employed an IT Manager in an attempt to improve the management of the infrastructure, as well as more effective use of resources and identification of areas for improvement.
The Brewster’s management teams do not have a lot of IT knowledge. The newly appointed IT Manager is very ITIL focused and wants to implement as many ITSM processes as is appropriate there are currently no formal processes in place. On starting with the company the IT Manager completed an internal assessment of the IT infrastructure – including staff skills analysis, and collated the results from customer satisfaction surveys completed over the last 5 years.
The main areas of concern are as follows:
Responses from customer satisfaction survey:
Overall a consistent satisfaction level. However, responses completed during the past 12 months show an increase in customers who were unsatisfied with call waiting times when contacting the service desk for help with online orders and requests for information.
Customers added the following additional comments:
“Never get to speak to the same person twice when dealing with an Incident number, had to call several times to receive follow up on progress”
“Some of the Service Desk staff seem under qualified to deal with my questions about new applications/incidents/service requests”
Results from Staff Skills Analysis:
Staff, in general, have a good knowledge of IT systems and a basic understanding of the business processes and objectives. However, staff are not well informed of upcoming releases of new or changed services and not given adequate information to relay to the customers.
Staff added the following additional comments:
“Communication between Service Operation departments has become inefficient - there are meetings for the sake of meetings, but the important information we need to know to do our day to day jobs is lacking”
“I still don’t know what half of the people do, that work in the IT department!”
Results from General IT Infrastructure assessment:
Lack of event monitoring and planning
Lack of input from Operational Support departments into Service Design
Lack of skill and information sharing across the Operational Support teams with regards to Incident, Problem, Workarounds and Known Error data.
Little to no proactive activities being carried out.
Refer to Scenario
Through further investigation you identify that there is no formal means of collecting data to identify service improvement, other than customer surveys. These are very subjective and do not give a balanced picture regarding quality of service.
Through discussions with the Continual Service Improvement Manager, you decide to start collecting a range of metrics to help identify service improvements.
Which metrics would be relevant to Service Desk?
% of calls resolved by Service Desk
Average time to identify incident
Average time to escalate incident
% of user updates conducted within target times
Customer feedback
Average Service Desk cost of handling incident
% of calls resolved by Service Desk
Average time to resolve incident
Average time to escalate incident
% of customer updates conducted within target times
Customer feedback
Average Service Desk cost of handling incident
o % of calls answered by Service Desk
Average time to escalate incident
% of customer updates conducted within Service Desk hours
Customer feedback
Average cost of handling incident
% of calls answered by Service Desk
Average time to resolve problems
Average time to escalate problem
% of customer updates conducted within Service Desk times
Customer feedback
Average cost of handling problem
Correct answer: B