Tag: Management

The Goal Book Review

~ Adam ~ 8 Comments

I recently finished reading The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. This is the book which is referenced in The Phoenix Project and Rolling Rocks Downhill so I was determined to get my hands on a copy and read it!

Alex Rogo is a Plant Manager, work isn’t doing so well… in fact he’s been given an ultimatum and is about to get shut down. In order to save his job he enlists the help of an old teacher who persuades him to question the standard measures and processes he’s been using his whole career.

What follows is a very interesting and in depth look at the Theory of Constraints (although I don’t actually believe the term is used in the book) as the team try to identify the bottlenecks in their plant and work on ways to exploit them.

Like the best books Eli doesn’t try to throw too many concepts at you, his message is clear – find the bottleneck and organise work around it. There are some great analogies (such as Herpie leading his fellow boy scouts through the woods) and you genuinely feel like you’re working these problems out alongside Rogo.

The last few chapters felt a little disorganised to me but they they carried an important message – build up the process of how to examine your system, don’t just rely on a defined step by step guide. Continuously review, understand, and adapt.

Would I recommend The Goal to other IT Managers? Absolutely! You’ll gain a great understanding of how to observe and measure your team’s throughput.However, I’d say it’s absolutely essential for anyone in software development to read The Phoenix Project first so you understand why we’re looking at manufacturing plants to help us run IT departments!

Monitoring Support Ticket Age

~ Adam ~ Leave a comment

There are various ways you can monitor how effective your support process is. You can record the number of tickets opened and closed, you can keep track of queue counts, or you can ask your customers!

When I develop a KPI I want a simple numerical value, something I can examine, track, and use to decide whether we are improving or struggling.

One of my favorite statistics to measure is the average age of tickets in the queue. The benefits of this are:

  • You can calculate it at any time and don’t need to measure tickets added and closed for a prolonged period of time.
  • You can get a feel for how long tickets are sat waiting for a resolution.

In other words it gives a rough value of how long a customer can expect to wait before you respond to them.

However, as with all measurements the act of measuring it can change the result. In our world this can have a very direct effect, if you only focus on how old tickets are you encourage a First-In-First-Out approach (as Developers and Support Analysts fight over the oldest tickets in an effort to bring down the average). This can undermine your attempts at ticket triage and prioritising.

This is a known risk when working out KPIs for your team. KPIs are often easy to manipulate (in our example a developer choosing to pick up an old P4 ticket over a new P1). It’s a risk yes, and any skilled problem solver will quickly work out how to game this measurement if they need to. However, I would hope you have enough confidence in your team to feel confident they will not to ignore urgent tickets for the sake of an arbitrary numerical goal.

What’s important is identifying the behaviours you want to encourage in your team. One of my first priorities in any role is to give customers a good level of service (and make sure they aren’t kept waiting too long for answers and support). If I want to achieve that I need a value which helps me record it, until I find a better one ticket age is my KPI of preference.
What KPIs do you use? Make your suggestions in the comments below…