Many have faced the question from upper management – “Can you tell me to what level your people are being utilized?”

If you don’t have an idea, you become paralyzed with fear at the prospect of having to think about how to answer the question or figure out where to start.

Many factors determine what constitutes a valid utilization rate. Depending on your environment (internal vs. external support), support structure (“live” vs. controlled/call-back), additional responsibilities assigned your technicians (projects, committees), and a host of other factors you may see numbers ranging between 60% and 85%.

The first thing is to establish a benchmark for where you are now. Begin by determining the best means to establish the measurement. This may be solely based on technician Talk Time or may include a combination of things such as Talk Time, Wrap Time, Project Time, or time entered through a call tracking or “time-clock” system.

By examining available reports from various sources, you can establish what the most accurate measure may be.

After establishing a “baseline”, gather some historical information – say four to six months worth - to see if there are trends. If you have chosen a metric that relies on human intervention (for example – updating some field in a call tracking system), you may find that your group is inconsistent from technician to technician when recording this information. Defining what will be used for baseline measurements and how it will be reported can help technicians understand why it is important to account for time spent in certain activities. These activities should include testing, research, documenting software bugs, and remote support sessions as well as the usual talk time and wrap time on calls.

After defining what metric(s) will be used to establish your utilization rates, you can use a simple spreadsheet to help crunch the numbers. Your basic equation will look something like this:

Utilization Rate = Baseline Activity Time / Available Monthly Hours

Expanding this formula gives us:

Utilization Rate = Baseline Activity Time / (Maximum Monthly Hours Available – Exception Time)

where

Maximum Monthly Hours Available = number of business days per month * number of FTE technicians * hours per shift

Exception Time = Time spent in meetings, vacation time, sick time, training time or other non-incident related time

To illustrate by example, assume:

• Baseline Activity Time is determined from reports obtained from the call tracking system
  
• The department consists of 8 full time technicians working an 8 hour day Monday through Friday
  
• Assume 21 business days for the month being illustrated
  
• There were a total of 64 vacation hours, 24 sick hours, 20 hours spent in various meetings and 16 hours training for a total of 124 hours of Exception Time
  
• Baseline Activity Time of 770 hours

Putting the numbers in our formula shows:

Utilization Rate = 770 hours / ((21 Business Days * 8 hours * 8 FTE) – 124 hours)
= 770 hours / (1344 hours – 124 hours)
= 63.1% Utilization

So What Does it Mean?

Depending on the support model and other factors, this example may indicate a department that is well staffed and able to assist other departments or take on other responsibilities as needed.

This is where utilization rates can be a valuable tool if used properly. Support departments are called on to assist many other areas of the business and having utilization information can help management make resource related decisions.

There may also be indications that service goals such as average wait time, may be too aggressive. A low utilization rate may indicate too many technicians are waiting for issues to be reported and might be better utilized elsewhere in the department – for example, doing research or composing knowledge base articles.

A low utilization rate may also indicate a problem with processes – especially if time is not tracked automatically. Situations like this call for management to provide guidance and/or tools for the technicians to report time as accurately as possible.

A high utilization rate may indicate that technicians are simply moving from issue to issue and quality may be suffering. Try to correlate utilization rates to other measurements such as surveys to uncover things like this. A department with an extremely high utilization rate and consistently low survey scores may do well investing in tools, training or manpower in an attempt to raise survey scores.

This information can also be rolled into a full-blown staffing model to help justify addition to staff or reallocation of staff to other areas of the business.

The most important thing to remember is that this information be used in a consistent manner and expectations of the technicians are set accordingly to help ensure that any “human intervention” areas of the process are addressed. Doing this helps validate the initial data gathered and provides direction either for improvement in processes or other adjustments that may be needed.

About the author
Additional information relating to staffing and utilization rates can be found in books such as “The Art of Software Support” by Francoise Tourniaire or “Microsoft Sourcebook for the Help Desk” published by the Microsoft Press.
John Alfonso, Technical Support Supervisor- FRx Software Corporation jalfonso@frxsoft.com.