Noel Bruton’s ambitious benchmarking exercise has been postponed until early summer.

The findings were to be unveiled at the Service Desk and IT Support Show, but outside pressures and an office move for Bruton have made the deadline untenable.

“When we looked at the project afresh, it seems we had been rather ambitious to get all this done before the Service Desk Show. The benchmark exercise would have been competing for the industry’s attention with the end of the financial year for many organisations, and with the marketing focus on the April exhibition for the vendors. We didn’t want to add to that burden,” says Bruton.

The IT Support Benchmark Project has a very different aim to other research programmes, aiming to provide actionable intelligence, rather than comparative data which while interesting, has little practical use.  “Our previous support benchmark produced such hugely useful things as an arithmetic rule, where from just one background number, you could work out how many calls your support desk would take, how many first- and second-line staff it would need, how much to pay them and what the likely end service level would be.  I want to update that formula, and add quite a bit more for our times.”

For further information, or to take part in the 2011 Benchmark, contact Noel Bruton via noelbruton.com.