ROI Guide: Runbook Automation for Service Requests, Chapter 1
It’s 11am. You have important projects to complete, but you’ve already been interrupted by multiple requests — tickets, Slack messages, and even a phone call. It always seems like someone needs you to do something. To make matters worse, these service requests are largely the same repetitive tasks.
Now it’s 2pm. Just when you finally get back to your project work, you find yourself blocked and needing someone else to perform a task for you. Now you are the one opening up a service request and waiting for someone else to provision, configure, or investigate something for you.
Where did the day go?
The inefficiency of service requests —waiting, interruptions, slow turnaround times — has long been accepted as part of our default way of working. We have learned to accept the status quo as “the way it is” and not question the staggering costs.
How much of your operations team’s day-to-day time is lost to the interruptions, waiting, and inefficiency surrounding service requests?
The loss could be as much as 35-45% of a team’s total time. That’s what was discovered during a joint study of operations teams at 14 large enterprises by the consulting companies Liatrio and DTO Solutions in 2017.
A common trait shared by nearly all of the companies? They each dramatically underestimated the amount of time they were losing to the interruptions, waiting, and inefficiency of operations service requests.
Let’s get started calculating the full costs of service requests in your organization.
This guide covers:
- Methods for calculating the total cost of the waste around operations service requests
- The ROI of leveraging Runbook Automation to turn service requests into self-service
How to get started realizing that ROI
Chapter 1, Start with the Basics: Turnaround Time and Interruptions
Service requests are the central day-to-day activity in Operations:
- Provisioning/updating environments
- Service restarts
- Scaling resources up/down
- inquiries about performance or current state
- Network/firewall changes
- Database updates
- Getting data
- And more…
Sometimes these requests come from colleagues on the same team. Sometimes these requests come from different teams or departments. However, no matter where the request comes from, two types of problems are introduced:
- Slow Turnaround Time – The person making the request is waiting. Even if they are multi-tasking while waiting, their original work is delayed, and there is the added cost of context switching between tasks.
- Interruptions – The person fielding the request is interrupted. While that person is handling the request, they are unable to perform other tasks or project work. Further productivity is lost because of the cost of switching off of the task they were working on and then back to it after they’ve handled the interruption.
Let’s look individually at the ROI of removing each of these wastes.
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