Accurate Metrics

I received an e-mail from our project's Help Desk representative. Apparently he devised a new way to track the trouble ticket metrics for the month. So I was curious about my own metrics for trouble tickets I had resolved. I looked at the metrics the Help Desk is reporting for me.

Out of a total of 24 tickets opened, I was assigned 6 of them. This sounds about right. A lot of tickets come my way for resolution. However the "Days Open" statistic for the problems I worked seemed to be very high. My average was 21 days.

If we are talking calendar days, then 21 days is 3 weeks. I normally knock out the problem assigned to me in a few days. Once in a rare while, I will need some information from a user who does not get back to me in a week. But that happens once or twice a year. Maybe they are counting these Days Open as some total time from when the user first encounters the problem to when there is confirmation that the problem is fixed. Sometimes it takes a lot of follow-up to get the user to confirm that the problem has actually been resolved. I don't know. The numbers still seem high to me.

The real kicker in all these metrics is, that even with all these details stats, I still received a comment from our Project Coordinator. Apparently the Project Manager asked her what was the status of our trouble tickets. We have all these detailed metrics but the knowledge about where we are at with problems is unknown.