Is anyone tracking IT team's time in Altiris Helpdesk module?
This issue has been solved. See solution.
rikala
April 8th, 2009
Hi all,
we need to implement time management within our IT teams (Infrastructure and Applications), where we could allocate our daily time for either Projects, Incidents, etc. We have been thinking whether it would possible to accomplish this in Altiris? Has anyone here done this, and do you have any instructions on how to do it? Or is it impossible (=not worthwhile) to do it in Altiris?
Cheers, Juho Rikala
We have looked into this as
When the ticket is open a timer starts, but only counts while that incident is being modified. This also takes up a license on the helpdesk. I would suggest having your users enter chunks of time when they edit the incident. They can also subtract time by entering a negative number.
One more function is calculation the cost of incidents, as you can enter a hourly wage for workers.
Other than that, we didn't find it very useful. We also have 200 + workers, so this might be a better option in smaller companies.
Yes
My VP/CIO wanted us to track our time. I looked at several options and settled on Altiris. There was NO money to purchase a product for tracking and since all of IT has access to Altiris, I shoehorned it in there.
We created a custom field for the time and we track in minutes. It's not exact and there are some issues, but we have a trial going on now and are working through them. Our goal is not only to show what we spend our time on, but where. I can pull reports by department and show them what we have done for them. It goes along with our new Customer Relationship management program. Some departments utilize IT resources more than others. We can now track and determine who, what, where, why, and when. The reports come out of Crystal for the VP. I have basic reports in Altiris for the Associates to use. So far it's working.
We track all our projects in Altiris now. Anything done for a project is tracked against that project. I also created quick incidents for Administrative time (meetings, email, etc.) and for Maintenance time (checking logs and general maintenance) plus Time Off (we log our time off using this incident). All hours for the week should roll-up to 40+ and for the day, 8+.
We log our time against the normal tickets assigned to us by the Help Desk and create our own when receiving email or phone requests from our users. Everyone will track their time, including the Directors and managers.
So far the CIO is happy. He's getting the data he needs not only to ensure proper staffing levels, but to "justify" our existence (you can all appreicate that) plus will allow him to make the case to increase staffing or keep it as is. In this environment where cost cutting is the name of the game, this type of data is very, very important to saving jobs.
If you would like more information, email me.
We tried it
Ultimately, mgmt was trying to do both resource planning and work/time tracking in Altiris. We began projecting how many hours an incident would take for us to complete in the Closed Code field. Then we would add in our actuals in the minutes field. This became confusing since the projection was done in hours and the actual in minutes. And most of the work went into trying to report on this information. What we've found a year later is that no one is using it and mgmt isn't reading the reports anyway.
Now, we try to limit the customizations for simplicity sake and we're looking forward to the new product and what functionality it will bring that they will want to use "out of the box". :)
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