YOUR BEST ITSM BUDGET EVER How to be absolutely sure you 've thought of everything for 2016.
" End user support makes up 95% of the perception of IT across an organization. But, the typical IT department spends barely 5% on end user support." " Jeff Rumburg, Managing Partner & Co-Founder, MetricNet
Bean counting has never been so sweet. Creating an IT Service Management (ITSM) budget is one of the most challenging efforts inside any IT organization. With all of your traditional fixed costs, plus the constantly changing capital costs for technology, it s no wonder many IT departments simply focus their efforts on the network, firewalls, wireless, hardware, and business applications. IT service and support organizations concentrate almost exclusively on the line items and hardly begin to attempt to show how they can increase the quality, costs, and success of the services they provide - whether it s better end user support, a new service desk solution, or the need to move their services to the cloud. There's a need to start shifting the focus away from equipment and more toward the needs of end user support. In the past, IT has been the gatekeeper of all technology decisions and purchases. As companies move from the traditional workstations to BYOD policies and remote workers on mobile and tablets, a massive shift is occurring in the annual IT budget development process. As the face of the entire IT organization, the IT service and support team has a unique opportunity - and responsibility - to better understand the needs of the company and industry implications that can come from budgeting decisions. If IT service and support can understand and contribute to the well-being of the organization, not only will end users be much happier, but upper management will be as well.
Industry Trends Impacting Your Costs Creating an effective budget for the IT service and support organization needs to focus on maximizing value, while creating even greater economic value across the organization. Rather than following the approach IT departments have always used, it s critical each budgeting year to keep up with the latest changes and industry trends that may have an impact on headcount and spending levels. Facilities expenses are on the decline as more support personnel work remotely or from home. Not only are remote workforces growing, but so are multi-office operations. These each pose different facility and technology decisions for IT services and continue to be growing factors in an IT service and support budget. VoIP systems enable calls to be made through a computer equipped with VoIP tools. While VoIP isn t brand new, it is changing service and support budgeting as corporations move away from desk phones in favor of applications like Microsoft Lync. VoIP continues to drive down telecom costs significantly, telecom now represents a much smaller percentage of total spending. Before budgeting, it s important to understand the business goals and forecasts for the upcoming year instead of relying on what was done the previous year. Access to the support organization is trending toward lower cost channels - chat, self-service, and web-submitted tickets. The more chat and self-service options provided to end users, the lower the cost per ticket will be. Implementing a cloud-based service desk solution can provide IT service and support with the opportunity to significantly reduce the number of calls to the service desk, dramatically increasing service techs productivity and freeing up the IT team to deal with more complicated and pressing technical concerns, all the while driving down support costs. Technology costs are decreasing rapidly as fixed cost. Capital intensive hardware and software tools are being replaced by variable cost subscription-based tools. For example, on-premise solutions are being replaced by cloud-based, software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions. Infrastructure downtime costs businesses thousands of dollars each year, potentially causing lost revenue and damaging IT s reputation. By budgeting to move service management to cloud services within the annual budget, IT service and support has the opportunity to virtually eliminate downtime and lessen the burden of managing a vast, expensive and possibly unruly IT infrastructure. Virtual training is quickly becoming the preferred method of training, allowing for service and support staff to achieve certifications without ever leaving the office. This means training budgets are coming down as the trend toward computerbased training quickly rises. Also, training for users throughout the business can bring considerable cost savings in the long run aiding individual users to be more competent with the software and hardware they are using.
Key Questions to Ask when Creating your ITSM Budget What is Your Average Monthly Ticket Volume? Tickets are the primary unit of work in desktop support. So, the one metric that should be tracked and consistently calculated is the average monthly volume of all ticket types handled throughout your IT service and support organization. Ticket volume is critical to track as it will drive the headcount of technicians needed by an organization. What is the Average Work Time per Ticket in minutes? Ticket work time is very different from the time that a ticket remains open. For example, if a ticket is opened at 8:00 am, and closed at 1:00 pm, it was open for five hours. However, if the technician only worked on the ticket for the final 30 minutes before it was closed, the work time for the ticket would be 30 minutes. If you have not been tracking this metric ongoing through the year you may be missing one of the most important elements of your budget. Average work time per ticket is a metric that goes hand-in-hand with the the labor required to not only staff your service and support team, but to determine the amount of labor it takes to resolve one incident. Staffing is based on workload, and those headcount requirements are driven by a wide variation of workload requirements from company to company, and from industry to industry. There is no one size fits all when it comes to the perfect work time per an incident, but understanding your service and support team s needs based on this metric will help you determine what should change next year in headcount. What is the Average Technician Travel Time per Ticket in minutes? With companies reporting that almost a quarter of employees are working remotely or from home, the workforce outside of corporate offices is growing across all industries and company sizes, making the time spent getting to and from a service request more challenging and time consuming. When technicians must walk or drive to the site of the ticket, there is going to be some travel time associated with each ticket. Those organizations that provide only support via chat, email, or over the phone are in the enviable position of having no travel time to calculate. Is your support operation 24 / 7? This is as simple as Yes or No. This data point is important because service and support groups that operate 24/7 tend to be inherently less efficient than support organizations operating Monday through Friday during normal business hours. The result is that 24/7 support groups will have higher headcount and operating expenses than groups that operate only during normal business hours. What is the average annual salary for an entry level technician ( US dollars )? It is common knowledge that labor, i.e. personnel, is the single biggest expense in service and support. In fact, personnel costs make up almost 70% of all service and support costs. Once you determine the average salary of your entry level technicians, it becomes easier to estimate the salaries of other support personnel such as supervisors, managers, team leads, workforce schedulers, trainers, and QA/QC personnel.
The Samanage ITSM Budget Calculator To address these fundamental issues, Samanage, with the help of our partner, MetricNet, has developed a powerful tool that takes the guesswork out of budgeting and staffing. The Samanage ITSM Budget Calculator can be used both as a reality check and a planning tool. This easyto-use calculator enables support organizations to determine whether they are staffed appropriately, and whether or not their spending level is in line with industry norms. Once you have entered your data, the Samanage ITSM Budget Calculator provides you with an estimate of headcount by job title, and operating expense by line item. You also have the option of manually overriding some of the metrics and assumptions included in the calculator. Anyone working in IT Service Management who is looking to get a much better handle on what their headcount and cost should be is encouraged to use this tool. If you would like assistance as you think through your budget requirements for IT Service Management, the team at Samanage is here to help. We are always available to discuss your individual needs when it comes to headcount, staffing, training, and specifically finding the right enterprise service management solution to meet your current and future needs. " 87% of users state that their IT service desk is a major factor in their overall satisfaction with their corporate IT organization. " -Jeff Rumburg
About SamanAge Samanage delivers cloud-based enterprise service desk and asset management solutions that instantly offer excellent visibility into every incident and every service request, wherever they happen in the world. With rich data into service performance from thousands of organizations, exceptional insights into service quality and costs, and ways to continuously improve service delivery, Samanage is in the business of empowering IT to significantly impact the entire enterprise. To learn more about Samanage, visit www.samanage.com or call 1-888-250-8971.