On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 10:27 AM, Bryan Ramirez <brwhy...@gmail.com> wrote: > Moving this over to this mailing list... > > My boss was asked to come up with metrics by which to measure how > much/well his team is working. I have some ideas, but without much time > to think about it and without much experience with such things, I'm > afraid of creating bad incentives (closing tickets fast, making > everything into a ticket, covering up problems..). Does anyone have a > set of metrics that they use to "measure" the work of a sysadmin team > that they like? Do they have metrics that they don't like? Why? > > Thanks, > Bryan
Encourage people to think things through and avert problems before they happen, and design correctly to avoid them. Discourage the cowboy/firefighter mode of operation. Encourage analysis of the *process* when problems occur. Discourage finger pointing and blaming *people* when problems occur. You are right in thinking that "closing tickets fast" is a bad way. It's lazy and encourages the wrong kind of environment. If covering up problems is an official mode of operation, you've got bigger problems to deal with. Making everything into a ticket is a good idea, as it forces everyone to be accountable for what they are doing. You don't want black ops projects going on. For small things, like helping someone find the wireless network switch on his laptop, you can skip or capture in one bigger ticket for "desktop support stuff I did today". However, if the overhead for creating and maintaining tickets is too high, people won't use it. You should only need fields like title, description, severity, comments, resolution, file attachments. Avoid turning it into a project management app by tracking hours spent on each ticket, forcing people to clock-in/clock-out when they work on a ticket, etc... That stuff is the job of your manager to decide if someone is being reasonably productive as an employee. There are some methodologies out there that help with this kind of thing (like ITIL), and books like "The Visible Ops Handbook" and "The Practice of System and Network Administration" that go into more details. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
