Measuring and Reducing Room Tickets, Room by Room

Monday, 11:00, at Pennant Media, in the monthly review between the desk and facilities. Ruth, the head of facilities, says what she says every month: "The rooms are fine. I hardly hear about them." Dara, who runs the desk of four, has for the first time brought a sheet instead of a feeling. Thirty-eight room tickets last month across fifteen rooms. Fourteen of the thirty-eight from one room, the one everyone calls the Studio. Twenty-five of the thirty-eight fixed in under a minute, which means twenty-five walks to press a button. Ruth looks at the sheet for a while and says, "Why does nobody tell me about the Studio?" Dara has the answer to that too, which is that until last month nobody had counted.

Measuring room tickets means counting them by room, by cause and by how long the fix took. The aim is that the problem room, the problem cause and the moments where a person needed showing rather than a room needed fixing all become visible. And reducing them means pulling the levers the count points at, cheapest first. Room tickets are small, numerous and easy to ignore one at a time. That is why they are only ever reduced by a desk that looks at them together. This article is part of our Meeting Room & AV Support series. It is the last of six, because the other five are the levers and this one is how you know which to pull.

It covers why room tickets are counted on their own. Next comes getting the room onto the ticket, with the three fields that make the count possible. Then come tickets per room per month and the table that shows them, followed by the problem room and the share fixed in under a minute. After that come the training moment, the quarterly review with facilities and the reduction levers in order. What one fictional desk got back, in ranges, a short war story and the room scorecard to copy follow, in that order.

Why Room Tickets Are Counted on Their Own

A room ticket is usually a one-minute fix. And a desk that reads its tickets one at a time will never see a problem in a one-minute fix. The cost is not in any ticket; it is in the thirty-eighth one, in the fact that fourteen of them were the same room, and in the audience each one had. The ordinary ticket report, which sorts by age and priority, puts room tickets at the bottom of everything. That is because they are resolved before they are old and they are never marked urgent after the fact. The count has to be made deliberately, by room, or it is not made at all.

Counting also stops the room ticket being the untracked walk-up it naturally wants to be. The response standard in The 9:01 Panic says the ticket is written after the walk, every time, including the thirty-second ones. The reason it says so is this article. A walk without a ticket is a fault without a room, and a fault without a room cannot be counted against it. Facilities hears about rooms only when someone complains loudly, and people do not complain loudly about a button. The desk is the only party that sees all thirty-eight, and the count is how it tells anyone.

The base rules for counting tickets at all cover which month a ticket belongs to, what counts as one ticket, and what to do about merged and duplicate ones. They are in Counting Tickets Properly and are not repeated here. This article adds the three fields that make a room count possible and the cuts that make it useful.

Getting the Room Onto the Ticket

The count needs three things on every room ticket: the room, the cause, and how long the fix took. The first is the one most desks lack. A room field, holding the room's name spelled exactly as it is on the door and on the card, is the whole requirement. Free text in the subject line is not, because "Studio", "the studio room" and "Rm 2 (Studio)" are three rooms to a filter. Most tools let a field be added to a form. A drop-down of room names is the form of it that survives a year of technicians typing in a hurry. Some desks give rooms a department of their own, with its own form for organisers and its own mailbox for the walk's findings. QuerySolv and many tools support this. The aim is for room tickets to land in one place and for the count to be a filter rather than a search.

The cause is recorded at close, by the technician who walked, in one of a handful of values. Five is enough. Equipment fault is where something was broken. Configuration is where the input, the sharing or the sign-in was wrong but nothing was broken. Unfamiliarity is where the room was fine and the organiser did not know how to use it. Booking is where the room was not invited or was double-booked. And presenter device is where the fault was the laptop and not the room. A sixth value, found on check, marks the faults the weekly walk found before anyone met them. That lets The Room Check Routine be measured against the calls it prevented. The technician picks the value in the corridor on the way back. It takes four seconds and it is the most valuable four seconds in the series.

The time is a flag, not a stopwatch: was the fix under a minute once the technician was in the room, yes or no. Most tools time a ticket from when it was opened. A room ticket opened after the walk is timed from the wrong moment. So the flag is set by hand and it is the only timing that matters. Beside it, a second flag: would the card on the table have fixed this, yes or no. These are two boxes, ticked at close. Between them they tell the desk whether its room problem is equipment or knowledge. That is the question the whole of this article turns on.

Tickets per Room per Month

The first cut is a table with a row per room and a column per month. The first thing it shows is that room tickets are never evenly spread. Take Pennant's fictional month: thirty-eight tickets across fifteen rooms. The Studio had fourteen. The two large rooms had five and six, three medium rooms had two or three each, and the remaining nine rooms had one or none. A desk that had been thinking of "the rooms" as a single thing had, in fact, one problem room, two busy rooms, and twelve rooms that were fine. That is the usual shape, and it is the shape described in general in Finding Hotspots in the Ticket Data, where a small number of sources carry most of the tickets. The method there, cut the data by one field, sort, and look at the top, is the whole method here; the field is the room.

Read the table from the top row and the bottom row. The top row says where to go first. The bottom row says what kind of problem the building has. Twenty-five of thirty-eight fixed in under a minute and nineteen that the card would have fixed is a building whose room problem is mostly knowledge and labelling, not equipment. And that changes which lever to pull. A building whose bottom row said eight of thirty-eight under a minute and a top cause of equipment would be a building with failing kit, and would pull a different lever. Same count, same table, opposite answer. The table is cheap and it is honest in both directions, which is more than can be said for "the rooms are fine".

Where the booking data exists, divide by it. The Studio is the most-booked room in the building. Fourteen tickets in a room with two hundred bookings is a different fact from fourteen in a room with thirty. Tickets per hundred bookings is the fair number. It occasionally reverses the order of the table. That is worth knowing before the quarterly review names a room in front of facilities. Where the booking data is not available, the raw count is still the right place to start. In that case, it just needs the sentence "the Studio is also our busiest room" said beside it.

The Problem Room

The problem room is the one with a count well above the others, month after month. The count only says that it exists; the cause column says why. Four reasons account for nearly every problem room. It is the busiest room, in which case the rate per booking may be unremarkable and the fix is capacity. It is the odd room, built differently from the rest. In that case, every organiser meets it for the first time and the fix is the profile in Standardising Rooms to Cut Tickets. It has a failing part, a display that forgets its input or a microphone that eats batteries. In that case, the fix is a swap, and the room joins the bad-rooms list beside the lemon laptop models in Device and Model Hotspots. Or it has a bad layout, a cable at the wrong end and a camera on the wrong wall. In that case, the fix is furniture and the conversation is with facilities.

Pennant's Studio was the odd room: a specialist fit-out from before the standard, with four inputs, a switcher, and a remote that changed the input if you sat on it. Every other room in the building had one input and a labelled cable. Nine of the Studio's fourteen tickets were the wrong input. The fix was not a repair; it was a label on the switcher that said which input the cable used. There was a second label on the remote saying "do not change the input". And there was a place in the queue to join the large profile when the switcher died, which it was clearly working on. The ticket count the following month was five. The walk found two of them.

Name the problem room in the review, not the people who book it. The count is about a room, and a room can take it. The moment the review becomes "the sales team keep breaking the Studio" the sales team stop calling the desk and start calling each other. Then the count falls for the wrong reason. A room with fourteen tickets is a room with a design, a label or a part that needs changing. And the people who met the fourteen faults were doing it a favour by reporting them.

The Share Fixed in Under a Minute

The share fixed in under a minute is the single most useful number in the room count. That is because it says whether the desk is being asked to fix rooms or to teach them. A building where most room tickets are under a minute is a building where the rooms work and the organisers do not know how to make them. Its levers are the card, the labels, and the training moment, all of which are cheap. A building where few are under a minute is a building with faults. Its levers are the walk, the swap and the replacement, which are not. A desk that spends its room budget on new displays when the under-a-minute share is two in three has bought equipment to solve a labelling problem. The new displays will generate the same tickets with newer inputs.

Read the share by room as well as in total, because the building's answer is often not the problem room's. Pennant's Studio was eleven in fourteen under a minute, a knowledge problem in a confusing room, and its fix was labels. Pennant's boardroom was three in six, and its top cause was a microphone battery, which is an equipment problem with a walk-shaped fix. The share is also the number to watch after a lever is pulled. When the card goes on the tables, the under-a-minute tickets should fall first and fastest, because those are the ones the card is for. If those tickets do not fall, the card is not being read.

The Training Moment

A ticket whose cause is unfamiliarity is a person who did not know. The training moment is the thirty seconds at the table, after the fix, when the technician shows them. "That's the input button; it's the second line on this card; next time it will take you ten seconds." Said kindly, pointing at the card, in front of nobody if possible, it converts a ticket into a person who will not raise that ticket again. They will probably show the colleague beside them. Said badly, "you just had to press the button", it converts a ticket into a person who will never call the desk again. They will sit through the next fault in silence. The difference is entirely in the tone, and the tone is the desk's choice.

The organiser who calls every week with the same fault gets the same walk every week, because the standard says so. They also get an offer: five minutes in the room at a time of their choosing, with no meeting waiting, to go through the card. Most say yes. The department whose organisers all call about the same thing gets the same offer at scale: ten minutes at the start of their team meeting, in the room, with the card. That costs the desk ten minutes and removes a month of walks. A ninety-second video of "how to share in a medium room", made the way The Ninety-Second Video describes, sits in the knowledge base. It is beside the guide for everyone who would rather watch than ask. None of this is a training programme. It is the desk noticing that twelve of this month's thirty-eight were people, and treating people as the cheapest lever it has.

The Quarterly Review With Facilities

The desk and facilities meet once a quarter about rooms, with one sheet. The sheet is the scorecard at the end of this article. It carries the quarter's tickets per room, the problem room and its cause, the under-a-minute share and the found-on-check count from the walk. It also carries the consumables used, the spares shelf against the standard, and the exceptions list with its review dates. The decisions it exists to produce are few. Which room is replaced or re-profiled next? Which room gets a label or a moved cable this month? Which part is swapped? Which room is retired from the booking system until it is fixed? And does the standard need a line changed? A review that ends without one of those decisions written down was a conversation about the weather.

The review is where the desk's count meets facilities' budget, and the count is what makes the budget conversation possible. "The Studio generated a third of our room tickets this quarter, nine in ten of them under a minute, and a label fixed most of it; the switcher is on borrowed time and the large profile would cost this" is a sentence a facilities manager can act on. "The rooms are a nightmare" is not. The one-page format for taking the same numbers above the desk, to the people who own the money, is in The Quarterly Review. The room scorecard is designed to drop into it as a single line: calls this quarter, share under a minute, the problem room, the decision taken.

The review also looks at what the walk found, because found-on-check tickets are the ones the organisers never met. A quarter in which the walk found twenty-seven faults and the organisers met forty is a quarter in which the walk did real work. The ratio moving in the walk's favour over a year is the measure of the check routine. The method for turning found-on-check counts into an honest estimate of prevented calls, without claiming every dead battery would have been a 09:01, is in the proactive-remediation series. The scorecard carries the raw counts for it.

The Reduction Levers in Order

The levers are the other five articles in this series plus two. The order is by cost, cheapest first, because the count usually says the cheap ones will do most of the work. The card on the table costs an afternoon and cuts the under-a-minute tickets. Labels cost a morning per room and cut the configuration tickets. The weekly walk costs a few hours a month and cuts the equipment tickets that appear between meetings. The training moment costs thirty seconds a ticket and cuts the unfamiliarity tickets. The standard costs a rule and a few years of replacing on failure, and cuts everything by cutting what needs to be known. Replacement costs money and cuts the equipment tickets that the walk keeps finding in the same room. Retirement, taking a room out of the booking system until it is fixed, costs a room and cuts its tickets to zero. That is sometimes the honest answer for a quarter.

• Card on the table: an afternoon; cuts tickets fixed in under a minute.
• Labels on the cable, the input and the remote: a morning per room; cuts configuration tickets.
• Weekly walk and morning check: a few hours a month; cuts equipment faults found during meetings.
• Training moment and the ten-minute team session: minutes; cuts unfamiliarity tickets.
• Room standard applied to every purchase: a rule; cuts what needs to be known.
• Swap or replace the failing part: money; cuts the repeat equipment fault in one room.
• Retire the room until fixed: a room; cuts its tickets to zero while the fix is found.

Pull one lever at a time where you can, and watch the count for a quarter before pulling the next. That is because a desk that puts cards on the tables, relabels every room and starts the walk in the same month will see the count fall. It will have no idea which of the three did it. The count by cause is what tells you: cards move the under-a-minute share, labels move the configuration count, and the walk moves the equipment count and raises found-on-check. A fall in the right column is a lever that worked. A fall in every column at once is good news that taught you nothing.

What Pennant Media Got Back

Pennant's fictional figures, in ranges, with hours as the currency. The desk had been taking thirty-five to forty-five room tickets a month across fifteen rooms, at six to eight minutes each including the ticket. That is four to six hours of walking a month, plus the meetings that started late, which nobody had counted. The first quarter with the count pulled two levers: cards on every table and labels in the Studio. The next quarter's count was twenty to twenty-eight a month. The under-a-minute share had fallen from about two in three to about one in two. And the Studio had gone from a third of all tickets to one in seven. The second quarter added the weekly walk, and found-on-check tickets appeared at six to nine a month while organiser-reported equipment faults fell to two or three.

A year on, with the Studio on the large profile after its switcher finally died, the desk was taking twelve to eighteen room tickets a month, two to three hours of walking. The quarterly review with facilities had a sheet with four rows of decisions on it. Ruth no longer says the rooms are fine. She says which room is next, which is a sentence the count made possible and the feeling never would have. Those are one desk's numbers and the shape is what transfers. The first cheap levers take the count down by something like a third to a half. The walk changes who finds the faults, and the standard takes years and finishes the job.

A Short War Story: Room C12 at Oakfield College

Oakfield College's desk, run by Fergus with two technicians, told the estates team for two years that the teaching rooms were fine. That was because the desk fixed each room fault in a minute and never looked at them together. Room C12's display lost its input every night, for a reason the desk never had time to find because each morning's fix was the input button. Over two terms the lecturers who used it learned to arrive ten minutes early, then to ask timetabling for a different room, then to stop reporting it at all. The timetabling office, which had no idea why C12 was unpopular, moved the largest first-year course into it. A lecturer called Beatrice spent the first six weeks of the year starting every lecture by phoning the desk in front of a hundred and forty students. The count, when Fergus finally made one, put C12 at a third of all room tickets for the year, nearly all under a minute, nearly all the same fault. The display's behaviour turned out to be a failing part that the supplier replaced in a week. The cost was two terms of lecturers avoiding a room, a timetabling mess that took a term to unwind, and a desk whose reputation with the academic staff was "they just press the button". The lesson Fergus put on the first scorecard was that a problem room is a number for a month before it is a reputation for a year, but only if somebody counts.

The Room Scorecard

The scorecard below is one sheet per quarter, filled from the monthly count, and it is the document the desk takes to facilities. Section A is the quarter's totals. B is the table by room with the two flags and the cause. C is the walk's findings and the consumables. D is the problem room and its cause in plain words. And E is the decisions, each with an owner and a date. Keep a copy with each quarter's tickets so that next year's review can see the trend. Keep the room names spelled as they are on the doors.

ROOM SCORECARD — ONE QUARTER
Organisation: ______________________   Quarter: ____________   Prepared by: ______________
Review with facilities on: ____________   Attending: ______________________________

A. THE QUARTER
   Room tickets: ____   (last quarter: ____)     Rooms: ____     Tickets per room, median: ____
   Fixed in under a minute: ____ of ____          Card would have fixed: ____ of ____
   By cause:  equipment ____  configuration ____  unfamiliarity ____  booking ____  presenter device ____
   Found on check (walk): ____     Organiser-reported equipment faults: ____

B. BY ROOM (one line each; sort by tickets, highest first)
   Room ______________  tickets ____  under a minute ____  card would fix ____  top cause ______________  found on check ____
   Room ______________  tickets ____  under a minute ____  card would fix ____  top cause ______________  found on check ____
   Room ______________  tickets ____  under a minute ____  card would fix ____  top cause ______________  found on check ____
   (continue for every room with two or more tickets; list the rest as "others: ____ rooms, ____ tickets")
   Tickets per hundred bookings, where known:  ______________________________

C. THE WALK AND THE CONSUMABLES
   Walks done: ____ of ____ scheduled     Morning checks: ____     Test calls that failed: ____
   Batteries used: ____   Cables replaced: ____   Cards reprinted: ____   Adapters missing: ____
   Spares shelf against the standard:  short of ______________________________

D. THE PROBLEM ROOM
   Room: ______________   Share of all room tickets: ____   Top cause in plain words: ______________________________
   Busiest room? yes / no      Odd room (not on a profile)? yes / no      Failing part? ______________
   Layout issue? ______________________________

E. DECISIONS (one line each; owner and date, or it did not happen)
   [ ] Relabel / move cable:  room ______________   owner ______________   by ____________
   [ ] Swap or replace part:  room ______________   owner ______________   by ____________
   [ ] Move to profile:       room ______________   owner ______________   by ____________
   [ ] Retire until fixed:    room ______________   owner ______________   by ____________
   [ ] Training session:      team ______________   owner ______________   by ____________
   [ ] Standard change:       line ______________   owner ______________   by ____________
   Line for the leadership report: "____ room tickets this quarter, ____ under a minute; problem room ______________; decision: ______________"

Dara took the first scorecard to Ruth with one decision on it, the labels in the Studio. Dara took the second with two, the walk and the Studio's place in the replacement queue. By the fourth the sheet had a trend line and Ruth had stopped asking why nobody told her. The thirty-eight tickets had always been there, one minute at a time. The sheet was the first time anyone had added them up. And a room ticket, it turns out, is only small until you count it.

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