Three Approaches to Quantifying IT Staff Hours Lost to Unplanned Downtime

Now that some initial questions have been answered in our series of qualifying the cost of downtime, we continue on by discussing measuring the IT staff hours lost due to unplanned downtime.  This is a key component to quantifying the cost of downtime, and we are providing three approaches below for quantifying those hours.
Approach #1 – Take an industry average

In the IT Operations Research Report: Downtime and other Top Concerns, we found that the average organization lose 2,115 hours of IT staff time due to unplanned downtime on an annual basis – a not insignificant number.

This type of industry average data is useful – in particular if you cannot get access to more internally specific information.

Approach #2 – Get data from your Service Desk Management System

By far the best approach is to pull the actual data from inside your service desk management systems. This approach does require a relatively mature service desk management system with the right metrics and tracking necessary to pull the appropriate information.

With that said, if the data is available to you, calculating the number of hours expended on a per downtime incident basis – and annualizing it becomes relatively simple.

Approach #3 - Survey Your Team

For those teams that don’t have access to a service desk management system that can provide direct data on IT staff hours lost, the next best option is often an internal time survey. While not as “hard data focused” as actual results from the Service Desk - the internal survey of time spent can be a reasonably effective mechanism for quantifying the expenditure in IT staff hours lost due to unplanned downtime.

Calculating a Cost of Downtime Due to Lost IT Hours

Once you have identified the annual IT hours lost due to unplanned downtime - the last task required is to understand the average hourly IT cost of the affected staff.  If you do not have direct access to the average hourly IT cost figure – ask your finance team member or business analyst – they should have the data you need.  If that doesn’t work, worse case use an industry best estimate, from a site like this one for example.

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Filed Under: Downtime, IT Operations