Anxiety mounts as IT professionals face 100-hour increase in time-critical, unplanned work

Customer experience suffers; business opportunities missed as IT teams firefight unplanned work, finds PagerDuty research.

  • 4 years ago Posted in

PagerDuty has released new research suggesting EMEA IT professionals are stressed by the increase in time-critical, unplanned work of more than 100 hours per person, per year (for 75% of respondents). The increase is impacting their ability to deliver on business priorities and assure a positive experience for customers.

 

In the EMEA State of Unplanned Work Report 2020, 53% of respondents in EMEA said unplanned work caused stress and anxiety for them personally (versus 61% in Asia Pacific (APAC) and a massive 80% in North America (NA)). 

 

Disruptive, unplanned work redirects IT resources away from key responsibilities and into fire-fighting mode, making it harder for teams to deliver on business priorities and take advantage of opportunities to innovate, according to 81% of EMEA respondents (compared to 81% in APAC and 86% in NA). Adding to the pressure, 73% of EMEA respondents said they typically find out about major issues from dissatisfied customers rather than their own systems (70% in APAC and just 47% in NA) so are on the back foot before they even start resolution.

 

Steve Barrett, Vice President, EMEA at PagerDuty, commented, “In an always-on world, customers expect companies to deliver a perfect digital experience every time. Anything less can severely damage the bottom line. Yet in increasingly complex IT environments, it can be difficult for responders to cut through the noise and get to the issues that matter, fast. Machine learning and automation can help bring together the right people with the right information in real-time, enabling resolution in seconds or minutes rather than hours.”

 

Unfortunately, for many companies in EMEA, opportunities to mitigate the impacts of unplanned work through automation are being missed. 81% of EMEA respondents said their organisations have little or no automation for IT issue resolution (77% in APAC and 92% in NA).

 

29% of EMEA respondents said they had considered leaving their job as a result of unplanned work, creating recruitment and retention challenges for employers (31% in APAC and 38% in NA).

 

Barrett continued, “Companies can help improve the satisfaction and wellbeing of IT professionals by altering how, when and why individual responders are notified of IT incidents and benchmarking IT team health to ensure the effectiveness of their wellbeing strategies.”

 

Other EMEA findings include:

 

EMEA incident recovery plans are least likely to be fit for purpose 

70% of respondents in EMEA said they had experienced issues that their response plans failed to account for (versus 68% in APAC and just 53% in NA).  

 

EMEA is the worst communicator when it comes to major IT incidents  

While most companies in EMEA are quick to engage IT responders in the event of a major incident, many fail to keep key stakeholders informed:  

 

•           Only 50% notify all those on relevant teams (54% in APAC and 69% in NA)

•           Only 31% notify customers (43% in APAC and 47% in NA)

•           Only 36% notify employees (40% in APAC and 53% in NA)

 

EMEA teams dismiss postmortems

EMEA is also the least likely region to maintain a constructive dialogue after the event. Only 40% of respondents in EMEA said they use incident postmortems to continuously hone their incident response (compared with 47% in APAC and 67% in NA).

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