Fighting Fires and Wasting Time

When your staff spends time fighting fires, they have less time to improve the environment. This Teamquest study illustrates the problem.

According to this study, each IT professional encounters about 20 "unexpected" issues per week. Each issue takes an average of 5 team members to address it, and it takes an average of one hour from each of these people to resolve the issue.

This is a staggering amount of time, when you add it up. In a typical environment, 30% of staff time is already spent on maintenance and mundane tasks. Only 8% is dedicated to proactive efforts, such as capacity planning, data management, and problem prevention.

What actions are you taking in your environment to address problems before they occur? Try to identify and characterize the most common types of fires your team has to fight. Rank them based on how much time they waste, and look at what would be required to prevent them.

Once you have cost/benefit information in hand, devote resources to preventing problems before they occur. Go after the lowest-hanging fruit first, then use the resources you free up to go after the others. Your team will appreciate the stress reduction, as well as the time they can now devote to more interesting and meaningful projects.