It's 7AM on a Saturday and I'm up because I'm not able to sleep much more. The past week has been a little crazy due to being move in week, or "First Week" as it's called at the University. Essentially it boils down to being about 1/2 to 1/3 of the Semester's workload boiled down into a week in IT. That's not actually accurate for "all work" but for "client work" and "opening new help requests" it is.
How do I know? Because I did the numbers recently. Over your average semester the Help Center will open up anywhere from 2500 to 3500 new help requests. Over your average first week (based on data from the past 4 years) we open on average 1100 to 1400 new Help Requests. So just over half to just under a third of the help requests for the Fall semester are opened in one week. The best part is, that number is lower than the amount of people we actually help since a lot of times there simply isn't time to make a help request for everyone you're helping.
Now, the rest of the semester will - by default - be more spreadout and quietter. There is still a lot of work to do. All the non-client work, work that happens without help requests, and any looking into those 1500 help requests that has to happen still will all fill the time, but after that weak everyone in my department is quite tired.
Looking forward I have hope. Hope that with the ramp up to the new Semester, and first week itself, out of the way that there will be time for other things.
How was your week?
