The four columns
One line per kind of demand, in this order. Tab or comma separated, pasted straight into the box on module i, or typed in by hand.
- Demand, in the words the customer would use. Chase an update on something already logged, not Incident, Priority 4, Category: Service Desk. This is the column that does the work: translated into your categories, failure demand becomes invisible.
- Volume a month. A real month, not a tidy one. If the month you pick had a bad week in it, keep the bad week.
- Touch minutes. Minutes of actual work on one of them, if nobody was interrupted. Not handle time with the hold music in it.
- Elapsed hours. Hours from the customer raising it to it being resolved, on the clock the customer feels. Three working days is seventy-two hours to them, however your SLA counts it.
Download the template: a header row and the five lines of the worked example, so you can see the shape before you replace them with your own. The paste box ignores the header.
Getting it out of your tool
Every service management tool can export a month of tickets with a short description, the date opened, the date resolved and the category. The menu is called Export, Reports or Download depending on the product and the version, and the exact fields are named slightly differently in each, so what follows is the recipe rather than the clicks.
- Export the last full month. Incidents and requests together, resolved or not. You want what arrived, not what closed.
- Group by what the customer was trying to do, not by category. Read a hundred short descriptions and you will find that ten to twenty lines cover most of the volume. Name each line in the customer's words. Where the category says Access and the description says locked out again, the description is the demand.
- Count each line for the month. That is the volume column.
- Elapsed hours is the average of resolved minus opened for the tickets in each line, in hours. A spreadsheet does this in one column. Tickets still open at the end of the month count from opened to the end of the month, and if that makes a line look worse, it is because it is.
- Touch minutes is the one most tools do not have. If your tool records time entries or work notes with durations, use them. If it does not, ask the three people who handle that line how long one takes when nobody interrupts them, and take the middle answer. It is an estimate; it is also closer than anything your reporting will give you.
Tool by tool, the fields you are looking for: in ServiceNow the short description, opened and resolved dates and category on the incident and request tables; in Jira Service Management the summary, created and resolved dates and request type on the issue export; in Freshservice the subject, created and resolved dates and category on the ticket export; in HaloPSA the summary, date opened and date closed and the request type on the ticket report. Everything else has an equivalent. If you cannot find it, the ticket list itself, selected and copied, is usually enough to start from.
If you only have the counts
Tab 02 of module i has a switch: Only have volumes? Turn it on and give it two figures, minutes of work and hours elapsed, and every line you have not timed uses them. The lines are marked est. in the table, the flow efficiency card says how many of them are on assumed times, and the report says so in a sentence a sceptic cannot miss. Nothing about the failure demand figure or the queue arithmetic needs the times at all, so those stand on their own.
Then replace the assumptions with measurements one line at a time, starting with the five biggest. The shape of the conclusion rarely changes when you do. The number does, and you will want the real one before it goes in front of a board.
Two numbers for the queue
Tab 04 wants your work in progress, which is the count of open tickets on a typical day, and your throughput, which is how many you close on a typical day. Both are on the first screen of any service desk dashboard. With those two, Little's Law gives you the lead time your queue makes inevitable, whatever anybody's effort, and the gap between that and what you promise is the most defensible number in the whole kit.
What stays on your machine
All of it. The paste box, the table and the report live in your browser. None of it is sent anywhere, which is why there is nothing to sign up for before you start, and why the download button is the only backup there is.