Huge volume of tickets
30-50 tickets per day were generated at the client’s end. Per-day ticket handling was taking a toll on the internal support team.
How VE helped
RSI Security cut down
service TAT by 50%
100
Tickets handled per day
~2 hr
Average response time
Technique
Impact Effort Matrix
Overview
Objective
Expediting IT ticket resolution process through human and machine intervention.
Challenge
Reduce single ticket resolution TAT from 8 hours to 2 hours.
Approach
Impact Effort Matrix was combined with industry expertise to cut down time.
RSI Security at a Glance
RSI Security helps tech giants across the globe tighten the cyber defense frontier. Established in 2013, the company is PCI-certified Qualified Security Assessor and Approved Scanning Vendor, a HITRUST External Assessor Organization, and a Certified Third-Party Assessor Organization recognized by the CMMC Accreditation Body.
Learning the Ins and Outs
RSI security actively offers concierge-level support and strategic cybersecurity services to its 1000+ clients on a regular basis. This required the company to ensure every concern is handled immediately. Virtual Employee’s team drilled down at the organizational level to understand the requirement of the client. Further, VE’s team had to scrimmage through a mountain of resolved and unresolved IT tickets to bucket the same as per issues.
Here are some of the issues at the surface level:
Repetitive tickets
Multiple tickets were raised for a single task. If an issue was unresolved, similar tickets were raised by a user. This led to rise in ticket volume.
Backlog of tickets
Before RSI approached to sanitize the ticket handling process, the client was bogged by hundreds of daily unresolved tickets.
Client tickets
RSI Security offers concierge-level support and service to 1,000+ clients. These tickets were separate from internal IT tickets.
Report generation
Support staff had to generate daily, weekly, and monthly reports like StorageCraft, Usage tracker, licensing, SPX backup, and more.
Handling NOC alerts
Handling numerous alerts- Sensor, Sophos, LT checks, system uptime, SPX backup, Backblaze, and more.
Deep-diving into the scenario
To understand the path of a single IT ticket, VE’s team conducted internal tests and recorded process time. Given the company received 10-20 internal tickets and 50-100 tickets from the clients per day, this was a task for a team of dedicated 15 personnel. Managing a dedicated team for resolving IT tickets was not something RSI Security wanted. This is where VE came into the picture to provide IT support to RSI security an its long list of clients.
Aloha, Critical Thinking!
Extraordinary problems require extraordinary solutions! Instead of taking a longer route, we placed all our eggs in a trusted basket as time was key here. To create a system for handling IT tickets, we implemented an Impact Effort Matrix.
Important
Urgent
Do it now
This is the sweet spot – the low-effort, high-reward area. This is always the first solution teams should pursue to make a quick, substantial impact.
Not Urgent
Decide
Companies should only pick solutions that fall into this quadrant if they are committed to a long period of hard work will take to achieve them.
Not Important
Delegate
While these take little effort, teams should not prioritize these solutions. Instead, they should only give them attention after pursuing more rewarding solutions.
Delete
Any ideas, strategy, solution, or project goal that falls into this category requires some honest discussion about whether the team should do them at all.
To decide the urgency level of IT tickets, we used Impact Effort Matrix at the research level. Instead of jumping to aligning resources and engaging tools, we used a logical & human approach. This helped us chart the future of a surge in IT tickets at the internal and external levels.
How Impact Effort Matrix helped?
Aligned personnel as per project goals
Resource saving
Maximized workflow efficiency
Created a sequence of prioritized tasks
Putting Two and Two Together
Through the use of the Impact Effort Matrix, we were able to understand the priority level of every IT ticket raised from RI Security end. This also helped in creating priority buckets for all IT tickets, integrating business management tools, and much more.
Tools integrated into the system for managing tickets:
Business Management Tools
Centralized Security Management Tools
How we went about it:
Step1
“Set Priority to Urgent” automated workflow
Tickets marked as urgent fell into the bucket that was automatically prioritized by the VE’s team.
Step2
Keyword-based automation
To help bucket the tickets in a refined manner, specific keywords were added to the business management tools. This helped our team prioritize tickets that required urgent attention or less time.
Step3
Reporting Dashboard
Through the use of Mavenlink, the team was able to access all tickets and reports at a single dashboard. This helped our team and RSI security to keep a track of all the open, ongoing, and closed tasks.
Hitting the Jackpot
Through human and tech intervention, Virtual Employee was able to reduce ticket resolution time by 35%.
The team saves 8 minutes handling each ticket. It’s a 35% decrease in the ticket resolution process.
23min
15min
Creating a single source of truth
The primary goal of the RSI Security team was to create a single place to manage IT tickets. Whether tickets or trail mail, all the conversations would be on the same dashboard. The fact that Virtual Employee was easily able to integrate all requirements of RSI Security was very compelling.
Structuring the team responsibilities
With VE at its back, RSI security was able to provide unified support to its internal team as well as its 1000+ clients. This also enabled RSI Security to save on resources, divert resources to other internal tasks, and structure a team & processes in a better manner.
Transcending Limits with Talent.
Arman Bashir
Senior Project Manager
13 Years of Experience
Project management for IT, telecom, & security domainsCertifications:
ITIL foundation v3, Prince 2 Practitioner, & CSM
Skills:
- PMP
- MPLS
- SDWAN
- DSL services
- 2G
- 3G
Arman Bashir's insights and goodwill with the client helped him helm the project. When the project team raises an alarm, he scrutinizes the situation, lists the issues with possible solutions, and connects with the client for further actions.
Arman helped to:
Smooth out the latest development
Control the after-effects on behalf of the client
Guide the developers through the quicksand
