1

Hi All,

I am after some advice / input from you guys to assist with a slight change in my role.

This week I have (finally) moved away from our helpdesk team (same room, just about 20 feet away!) and my role for IT is moving slowly to become one of supervisory / monitoring rather than hands on day to day IT.

Whilst I literally love my team and trust them implicitly I do still need to be able to report on their activities and to be able to justify our existence as a team at the drop of a hat, and potentially budget for an additional staff member.

If any of you are in a similar position I would be interested in knowing what report or suite of reports you utilise to monitor your guys and the department as a whole, whilst working “from a distance”.

Thanks as always.

Glenn

7 Spice ups
2

My postition has changed over the years from a simple helpdesk position to someone with hands on cluster management, working with SAN and creating computer images.

Now I just deal with day-to-day jobs. Back to a helpdesk technician.

Personally I am just going to remind my manager of this when we finally have a job review (appraisal).

Perhaps you have a similar angle of attack, do you get job reviews/appraisals (where you make SMART targets and see how you can improve your job role etc).

EDIT: I completely mis-read your post… Sorry. Maybe this can be done via a stealth email with backing of the boss?

1 Spice up
3

Spiceworks will have good reporting, so long as your tech’s make sure they are logging all tickets, and also allocating time to them.

4 Spice ups
4

Using Spiceworks to document everything the tech’s are doing as well as breaking up the tickets into differrent types of requests such as provisioning, break fix, project, and so on. Once you have this you can create a report that will allow you to see the time spent per tech as well as per ticket type. If done properly this will go a long way towards explaining why you need a specific person or why a person needed to be repurposed.

3 Spice ups
5

I am currently the Implementation Manager and head of our IT group. Basically you want to be able to justify each member of your team. You can do this by drawing up a simple work-flow-chart or work-duties-chart for each team member. Outlining their individual day to day procedures and uses.

If you work as a team and each of you have different functions you can even set this up as a flow chart to show how each process gets passed to each individual team member.

If you already trust your people then you have nothing to worry about. Though it is good to have everything in writing or even picture form as to why each person is useful.

4 Spice ups
6

Start by setting up goals at a team level and then at an individual level. Make them smart goals , have regular meetings to review the progress/ any needed updates.

7

loana,

No disrespect meant at all but how does this fit into the question Glenn was asking? While I agree teams and individuals need to have goals, this is not something that is going to provide Glenn with instant feedback on what and how his team is doing instantly as well as justifying why he has the amount of people he has and possibly why he would need more people. Again goals are important but in my opinion not in this question.

8

Keeping tickets up-to-date and recording time certainly helps. That will show that your team is working. Everyone likes to likes to validate their existence, so keeping a list of notable issues resolved, as well as projects/tickets that have saved the company money or improved productivity, can help quite a bit.