A desk awash with potential, too held down by KPI's - IT Service Desk Analyst Specsavers Employee Review

The desk's sole metric for success is KPI's, or service targets, both within the desk itself and from the rest of the business. This is the benchmark that you, your boss, and your boss' boss are measured against, with very little wiggle room, and this might single-handedly be the biggest cause and effect to why so many people are having issues with the Management. The immediate obvious knock on effect to a system like this, is that problems are often left by the wayside for the phone stats. Whilst the desk is measured by the metrics such as "answering phone calls within x time" and "you solve X% of calls on the phone", this leaves many tickets to stew and die in the backlog, a frequent problem, leading to complaints, escalations, and in extreme cases, big issues that go unnoticed. It's easy to look at the shiny green phone call time, but miss that X store has had a complex issue sitting around for over a month, only getting worse with time, causes problems, and the sort of problem that doesn't get picked up in statistics. This is far from the only effect though, and another big emphasis is Rota Management, a contentious issue from the higher ups at present writing, that has caused a massive amount of disturbance, for moving from an arguably flawed open system with everyone's eyes on (to point out issues) to a closed system, where communication to who is in on a given day is passed around in hushed tones. This system, for all of the hype and preamble to roll this out, has not only lead to the same issues as the rota before, but has created new gaps (shift swaps not going through, weird rota schedules with day timing, etc) that also can't be now overseen by other staff members. Another big issue that the KPI hunting bleeds into is training. I say this with the upmost respect for the people who do the training, but the statement that you get "6 weeks training" is pure fabrication, and has zero basis in the reality of how you are set up to start working there. Whilst there are people who are willing to guide and support you, and a big genuine effort has been placed on improving the knowledge base system as of late, this simply cannot make up for the lack of prep you are given before being thrown to the wolves, often lacking access to the basic tools that you are needed to do the job, leading to stalled tickets, broken SLA's, escalations, etc. This is, again, in aid of getting the phone numbers to look good, KPI bleeding into everything it can. The above rings true for nearly all analysts on the desk, but not all. Some are very much spared this measuring stick, as they have specific tasks only they can do (because everyone else who could do them has left), and a less than ideal amount of effort is spent training up individuals to replace or assist them. For one of the more common tasks on the desk (database work), Nearly all training for this has to be done, out of hours, with very few breaks in for those people who do want to learn, but need to be taught. This causes SLA's to be missed, and stores to be unhappy. The above rings true for the non-senior analysts, but the actual senior/level 2 team is a desecrated shell of its former self, Partially in aid of bridging the communication gap between the two teams, but again, KPI rearing its ugly head when you can use senior members of staff to throw at the phones to make the number of queueing calls go down. For all intents and purposes, there is no longer a senior team. There is a team of a few people, who are occasionally given more serious tasks, but will invariably be used as another body to throw into the statistics grinder as needed. As pretentious and conflictory as it sounds, they are seniors because they have certain skills and experience that the non-seniors do not have, and you have to utilise that. You are wasting those who can do database work by having them spend 7 1/2 hours a day doing password resets, It's cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. You are giving people who can do tasks others cannot an easy out. You are also vastly underutilizing them when the time comes to it, so they can be both lazy and ungovernable. A Undertrained, micromanaged analyst desk, with a fractured, muddled senior division, management blinkers firmly set on the data, with far reaching knock on effects to everyone in the business, that are sweeped under the rug, as the agreed numbers are all green.