Cutting service desk backlog with HaloITSM dashboards

If you’ve spent a lot of time with your internal service desk, then you know the strangest part isn’t the ticket volume. You feel like you’re closing tickets left and right, the new/open queue is getting cleaned up properly, and yet you still get annoyed responses regularly. Meanwhile, you have escalations to prioritize… You thought that case was handled, but someone is telling you it wasn’t.

The challenge

So picture a company you might recognize: three sites, a staff of ~1,200 supported by a five-person internal service desk, and two infrastructure engineers. HaloITSM does its job handling everything from laptop requests to line-side faults, and tickets typically come about through these three routes:

• The self-service portal
• A monitored IT mailbox
• Engineers being stopped in the hallway

This system seems clean. Portal tickets are routed to the appropriate team in seconds, the team exports data from Halo into Excel to make reports every so often, and they’re trying to keep themselves accountable. However, tickets created outside the portal don’t route automatically, making it hard to keep track of who is responsible. Also, it takes a while to build those Excel reports, so they only build them once a quarter.

Unfortunately, one day, a fateful comment from an operations director exposed the gap in the organization’s operational visibility:

“My replacement laptop request has gone untouched for three weeks. What’s going on?”

What the team really needs

• Live open queue data without building a report
• Ticket age + staleness surfaced automatically
• Ticket ownership at a glance
• Instant and scheduled access to reporting, no development time
• Shareable data for the finance director (without needing a Halo login)

How SquaredUp helps

They connect to SquaredUp’s HaloITSM plugin, which gives them instant access to numerous data streams and out-of-the-box dashboards showing exactly the KPIs and ticket data they need to keep operations flowing smoothly. The Tickets Summary dashboard is especially helpful, exposing the number of stale tickets in the Open queue, the agents taking on the heaviest workload, and the critical tickets still needing attention.

In general, the ticket data is largely unsurprising. However, a few notable tiles change their perspective entirely.

Problem 1: A third of the queue belongs to nobody

The Unassigned count is a brutal discovery. One out of three tickets in their queue doesn’t get assigned to an agent, causing them to stay unattended for days. Their method of reporting manually (and infrequently) causes a massive rift between the team’s understanding of the queue and the reality of it.

The operations director isn’t the only one without a response in weeks. The Past Response Date count is higher than they want to admit, and there aren’t any people keeping their finger on the pulse here; nobody on staff has the time to constantly monitor and sound the alarm when things go south.

This is where in-house desks differ from service providers. For an MSP, an unowned ticket is an SLA breach against a paying client, and someone is watching the clock. Internally, there's no invoice and no account review, so an unowned ticket is invisible until somebody escalates. The queue absorbs it.

Problem 2: The queue is aging, not moving

The Stale Tickets tile materializes a metric that hasn’t been looked into previously. Several tickets haven’t been touched in over a week, and the Open Tickets Age is being inflated by this oversight. So the queue is looking a lot more like a stack; older tickets become concrete fixtures at the bottom while the active, newer tickets get more attention.

While digging into the stale tickets, they find:

• Tickets that should have been closed long ago (kit bought another way, faults on machines since replaced, joiners who had already left)
• Tickets legitimately parked on someone else (a supplier quote, a budget sign-off, a site visit scheduled for next month)
• Tickets picked up, part-worked, and quietly forgotten

Only the third pile is a service desk failure, but the quarterly export always lumps all three into one intimidating number that nobody wants to go near. Separating them is what makes the backlog approachable, and each pile needs something different:

• The first is a one-time job. Filtering the open ticket list by age gives the team a clear-down list they can work through in an afternoon, and those tickets never come back.
• The second needs a status change rather than a dashboard. Once tickets waiting on somebody else are moved to their own status in Halo, the Open By Status tile keeps them visibly separate, and the team stops counting other people's delays as their own backlog.
• The third is the one that needs watching, because it re-forms every week. A monitor on Stale Tickets means nobody has to remember to check: when tickets start going quiet, the notification arrives before anyone in the business notices.

The result

Once they get SquaredUp integrated into their day-to-day routine, they can start moving these numbers into a more comfortable range. Every morning, agents can get key insights into who/what needs attention, monitors and notifications deliver critical issues to the right people immediately, and a tile listing every open ticket eliminates guesswork.

Plus, people outside of the team see this productivity themselves by viewing the same dashboards through a shared link, without burning any user licenses! Scheduled reports replace the work they were putting into quarterly reviews, and they instead focus on clearing up the queue and tending to high-priority tickets. Same hard work, less blind navigation, more productivity.

Try it for yourself

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