What is a reasonable number of incidents in the backlog for an operational team?

[Ion Secrieru]

What is a reasonable number of incidents in the backlog for an operational team?

In other words, how many incidents can a team of 5 support engineers have open at any point?

Obviously, the first thing that comes to mind is - ZERO incidents in the backlog, but that's in a perfect world, or in the case of a mature, product and team, with all the processes present.

But still, what would be a reasonable number of open incidents in the backlog at any time?

Thank you.  

[Community Alums]

HI @Ion Secrieru ,

This Question is more of how you want to setup the Support process not a ServiceNow specific question.

You can have unlimited number of incidents or Zero Incidents, it's completely upto the management who decides or rather defines the Goals like  how many incidents you want to have in the backlog.

You can either go with a calculation of 10 incidents per person, what we follow for a mid-level organizations or you can setup tiers like, L1, L2 and L3, L1 gets all the incidents and then they escalate to L2 if they cannot fix then it rolls up to L3.

Let's understand what Support Engineers or service desk does as part of ITIL :

As the customer-facing function, it acts as the single point of contact between the service providers and users. It manages incidents, requests, communication, and often many incident management activities. Having an effective service desk creates a positive perception of your IT organization and builds trust with your users. 

The service desk is often confused for or grouped with the help desk, but they are not the same thing. A help desk is reactive and focused on solving specific IT issues quickly and efficiently. Typically the help desk offers basic incident request management and is used by smaller organizations that do not rely heavily on IT. The service desk, on the other hand,  is broader in scope and focuses on the wider needs of the organization. The primary goal of a service desk is to improve the IT processes across the company, including the help desk.   

Mark my answer correct & Helpful, if Applicable.

Thanks,

Sandeep

[Community Alums]

HI @Ion Secrieru ,

Any update to this ?Any follow-up required? if not

Kindly mark the answer as Correct & Helpful both such that others can get help.

Thanks,
Sandeep

[Musab Rasheed]

Hello,

That completely depends on criticality of Incidents and how big Servicenow process is for your client.

Suppose your client has very big servicenow process then Incidents count may be more like in 100s etc

Suppose your client has small servicenow process then Incidents count may be less like in 10s 20s etc

So it completely depends on how big/small servicenow process you are handling.

Also it is always better to keep count low specially for critical incidents even though process is big/small.

Just to conclude it is always better to keep incident count less specially of p2/p1 etc and if you have more Incidents in p3/p4 that generally don't impact much but better to keep count low as much as possible.

Best Regards

[Appli]

Hi, for me having more than 100 incidents per team of 5 ppl is definitely an area of concern. But "it depends" of course on many factors; priority of incidents, state (active or waiting for 3rd party), resolution commitments, reasons why they stay open if SLA timer is paused, etc

Hope it helps