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 2: Quicker Turnaround Times

” How much would you save if 35% of service requests became self-service?” 

Manual service requests introduce delay.  The way today’s enterprises are set up, most operations work requires someone else’s intervention (and often multiple requests across multiple teams).” Open a ticket and wait” is the default condition.

The Not-So-Hidden Cost of Context Switching

Context switching is the cognitive burden we put on our brains when switching between tasks.

Research has repeatedly shown that humans consistently misjudge how good they are at multitasking and underestimate the productivity lost during context switching.

How bad are we really at multitasking? Looking at the research, we learn that switching between tasks can cost a person 20-40% of their productive time!

Excess waiting also harms anyone’s ability to recover from the inevitable errors and miscommunication that come with complex knowledge work. Adding wait time causes the cost of recovering from mistakes to grow exponentially.

The longer the time gap between when the requestor made the request and when the fulfiller discovers a problem, the more difficult it is for the requestor to return to the original context (assuming it is even still valid). This pattern leads to even more delay during the back and forth to figure out the correct request or fix the problem.

Click here to continue reading Runbook Automation for Service Requests