Another common metric to determine the performance of the helpdesk is the number of incidents opened and resolved. Because the Incident is the starting point for the bulk of the work handled by the IT organization this is a great way to measure if the workload is increasing or decreasing. The difference between the number of opened incidents and the number of resolved incidents shows the trend. The number of incidents resolved shows the help desk performance. The average number of open incidents is less important unless the SLA times are not nearly met, as long as the average trend over a long period of time is zero you will see no increase in open incidents. If there is a backlog of incidents, you will need to aim for a trend that is lower than zero, because that means you are closing more than is being opened and you will be regaining control over the flow of incidents. Based on the above the formulas to determine the trend and helpdesk performance are:

Of course the performance indicator can be applied to a personal level as well. But when you determine this performance metric for individual support engineers you need to be careful to take into account the complexity of issues that each engineer tends to handle. Some people prefer to handle the simple incidents, getting a lot of quick solutions and thus a high performance rating. Some people prefer to handle complex incidents, getting fewer solutions, but solving that which others cannot and, unfortunately, showing up as having low performance in your metric. If you use the performance metric to rate individual support engineers make sure to always be careful of rating the valuable engineer that fixes things others cannot or will not fix with a low rating because your metric tells you to.