Help Desk Stats For 2011 Part 1

I enjoy stats. So when each year ends it's fun to see how our help desk stats have changed vs the prior year. Did we have more or less support requests? What were the variables driving the overall activity each month and the entire year? Were any IT initiatives or improvements reflected in the stats?

All things considered equal, we're hoping to see fewer overall requests each year. If that's the case, one could assume that our systems and equipment are performing well and thus staff are busy getting ministry done instead of needing IT support. However, things are often changing from year to year so it's important to factor in all variables. Opening a new multisite campus, replacing a phone system, upgrading everyone to a new version of X software - all these types of changes usually bring an uptick in support requests.

So how did we make out in 2011? Although I was VERY pleased to see that our overall requests were down from last year, I wasn't very surprised. Why? Our team, which includes several awesome volunteers, has labored hard over the past years to build a very solid IT foundation. And when you build a very solid foundation it will be reflected in things like server/service uptime and accessibility. Last year was an extremely quiet year from a "problem" standpoint … servers and their services did their thing and plugged along without intervention. This was a huge blessing since 2011 was the busiest year we've seen in a long time for other reasons. 2011 was our first year going from a 3 man IT team down to 2. Add to that several LARGE projects like: planning for building expansion that broke ground late 2011, planning to open a new pre-school in 2012, moving our multisite location to a permanent location with staff offices, relocating our main fiber connection into the building, started transition to predominately Mac platform for end users, and prepping to move the bulk of our production IT gear to a new datacenter downtown. There's prob other stuff, but those were some of the big one's that came to mind. So 2011 was crazy busy, but not from helpdesk requests thankfully! If we'd had stuff breaking left and right on top of all the big projects … well, I'm not sure the outcome ;-)

Stay tuned for part 2 where I'll go over more thoughts on our help desk stats and the tools we've used over the years.

Other 'help desk' posts you might like: http://jpowell.blogs.com/.services/blog/6a00d8345325d569e200d8345325d769e2/search?filter.q=help+desk

Comments

[Travis Kensil]

Good stuff! Some posts on your colo project would be cool!

[Jason Powell]

COLO blog posts are a for sure :)