Like many companies and departments thereof, we are continuously being asked to justify our headcount. Unlike other departments that have fairly-well-defined projects with fairly-well-defined manpower requirements, IT is different. Although we have our projects, most of what we do is reactionary. Things break unexpectedly. New/upgraded software is needed. Backups, Fix user errors. Educate users. Etc. Predicting our headcount requirements can only be based upon our prior statistical workload.
As you can probably guess by now, we have been asked to document what we do all day, down to the minute. This could easily be done with a spreadsheet. However, we need to do this for a bunch of people, and it needs to be standardized so we produce useful reports.
Therefore, we need something that uses a central database. We believe that most HelpDesk & CRM applications are overkill, and hope to find something simpler. We envision that at the end of each day, the user would launch the application (or web page) and be presented with a spreadsheet-type display similar to a timekeeping application. There would be category columns for types and sub-types of activities (troubleshoot, install, configure, customize, repair, educate, fix user error, etc) Each cell would have a pull-down for these categories, plus cells to identify the user or department being served, and short comments. We could create our own application to do all this, but I would like to believe that someone has already done so.
Any recommendations?
Gerry Champoux Williams International Lead Engineer 2280 E. West Maple Road Information Technology Walled Lake, MI 48390 ' (248) 960-2816 7 (248) 960-2607 * - * www.williams-int.com
