Runbook Automation for Service Requests: Chapter 3, How to Calculate the Cost of Waiting

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

Chapter 2: How to calculate the cost of the waiting that accompanies manual service requests:

Step 1

Number of Service Requests x Turnaround Time per Request = Wait Time

Step 2

( Wait Time x 40%* ) x Hourly Labor cost = Labor Value Lost

** 40% is an estimate for the average “non-recoverable” wait time that can’t be used for other value adding activity due to context switching costs, misaligned schedule windows, communication inefficiency, request follow-up, or other reasons.

Use Runbook Automation to Decrease Turnaround Times for Service Requests.

Most service requests happen because the requestor lacks the knowledge/context/privilege to perform the task themselves or lacks access to the environment or tooling.

1. When the requestor lacks the context/knowledge to do it themselves.             First, capture — as automated procedures —the steps that the subject matter experts would perform when fielding the service request.

Next, use Runbook Automation, to safely put those automated procedures into the hands of the requestors. This self-service will reduce turnaround time for those service requests to close to zero.

For those service requests that still need to be routed to a subject matter expert, Runbook Automation saves time by putting standard operating procedures at the subject matter experts’ fingertips.

2. When the requestor lacks the access to do it themselves

Whether the reason is security, compliance, or management control issues — compartmentalized access is a fact of life in enterprises that leads to the need for service requests.

Runbook Automation can safely open things up because you aren’t giving out  direct access to an environment or providing unrestricted access to a specialist tool. Instead, you are providing access to run a specific, pre-vetted automated procedure and the outcome is logged.

With Runbook Automation you can significantly reduce the number of service requests that occur simply because the requestor lacks access to an environment (for provisioning, diagnostic, or repair needs).

**Rundeck Tip: What can you expect? Analysis of the Rundeck user community shows us that it is common for an organization to find that up to 35% of all service requests can readily be converted to self-service. This takes the turnaround time for each one of those service requests from hours/days to near zero .

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