The unprecedented effect of COVID-19 has shaken the world like no other disaster in modern times, essentially changing the meaning of what will be considered normal. This is a crisis on a deep humanitarian level, and it’s posing unheard of challenges for the global economy and every type of business.
Responses are quickly rendered useless as the situation changes and the issues intensify in scale, speed and impact. The struggle to avoid ineffective, reactive approaches has consequently been even more difficult, and IT teams are at the coalface dealing with these challenges.
IT and business continuity
Globally, organizations are now being forced to re-evaluate how they operate, and the need to enable remote workforce collaboration is essential if businesses are to continue to maintain some form of business continuity in this time of extreme duress.
Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) is the platform specifically built to keep the modern workforce connected. In keeping UCC running effectively during the COVID-19 crisis, IT teams have become the unsung heroes of enterprise. But how do businesses balance IT staff shortages and cope with the strain on IT departments, especially with the increased demand for a sound UCC infrastructure?
Measuring success
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”. – Peter Drucker
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are not a new concept. They are commonly used across departments and disciplines to measure success. KPIs are used to determine how efficiently and effectively specific goals and objectives are achieved over a set period of time.
Within IT, KPIs and operational metrics will reveal a department’s overall performance, by measuring things like:
- Help Desk service level and customer ticket resolution
- Mean Time To Repair (MTTR)
- Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)
- System installation productivity
- First call resolution quality
- Cost of servicing per help desk request
- Server speed and hardware related performance
Every organization’s IT operations have specific KPIs, and metrics, in place to track improvements over time. It seems more important now than ever to pinpoint, measure and benchmark support metrics and KPIs.
The new working norm
As the impact of COVID-19 continues to drastically alter the world, the demand on IT teams has increased exponentially and KPIs should be adjusted accordingly to reflect the new working norm.
This will show what is happening in terms of IT support operations and what can be ramped up or changed to improve an IT department’s productivity and efficiency.
The benefits of identifying, measuring and benchmarking KPIs for technical support include:
- Improved productivity and performance management of IT teams
- Increased company network availability and uptime
- Improved customer service
- Reduced IT department operational costs
By tracking factors like cost, performance and output for various IT processes, it can help reveal gaps between past, current and desired performance.
Proving value
The appropriate strategies and indicators in place will help organizations track progress and save time, money and resources to maximize ROI and minimize downtime. Having the right tools in place can help IT teams efficiently and easily monitor UC environments, troubleshoot and optimize operations to meet KPIs. They can also measure and report on performance against these indicators to accurately prove value.
