How much does a provisioning ticket cost?
Those small changes and little adds. Pence, right? Can’t be much.
Well, according to research, it could be as high as $60 per ticket. And that’s just for account creation.
Throw in moves, adds, changes, user migrations, and any other “small” change your team makes, and they all add up.
And, sorry to be the bearer of bad news (it ends soon), but that’s only when things go smoothly.
That $60 provisioning ticket doesn’t account for human error and any repercussions. Here, we’re talking about the loss of time, drain on productivity, and lost revenue.
Yet, in most organizations, both the cost and the process of enabling users in Microsoft Teams go overlooked.
There are usually three reasons for this:
- Lack of budget to investigate
- In-house “always” equals low cost
- Project teams add value to BAU activities
Your next Microsoft Teams provisioning tool must factor in all three of these key criteria.
Ultimately, IT projects are all about getting users from product A to product B as quickly and least disruptively as possible.
Due diligence on how the organization continues to benefit from the new solution and how to provision users are not at the forefront of the here-and-now objectives.
The end result?
Unplanned and unseen costs rarely get attributed.
The cost of a semi-automated provisioning ticket
Most companies have some kind of automation in their user provisioning and will have several human intervention steps.
Using information available from Glassdoor, the average UK salaries of the people involved in the provisioning process are:
Annual Salary | Weekly Hours | Hourly Rate | |
1st Line Engineer | $30,000 | 40 | $14.42 |
2nd Line Engineer | $40,000 | 40 | $19.23 |
Specialist Engineer | $56,000 | 40 | $26.92 |
Using this information, alongside an average ticket resolution time for a user provisioning request to be 1.95 hours from initial request to delivery, the average cost of a semi-automated provisioning task is around $32.56.
Cost of a new user addition / change | ||||
Item | Resource | Number | Hours | Cost |
HR system input | Office Worker | 1.00 | 0.50 | $7.66 |
Service desk ticket logged | Office Worker | 1.00 | 0.10 | $1.53 |
Ticket triaged & assigned | 1st Line Engineer | 1.00 | 0.10 | $1.48 |
Ticket actioned by engineer | 2nd Line Engineer | 1.00 | 0.75 | $14.47 |
Ticket management | 1st Line Engineer | 1.00 | 0.50 | $7.42 |
Ticket Cost | $32.56 |
The average provisioning ticket includes a mixture of scripts and manual interventions.
The biggest loss of time is collecting the necessary settings and data to input into the various configuration steps.
For example, what Teams policies to assign, what number do they need, and which teams do they need access to?
These costs assume everything goes as planned.
So, what happens to the cost of provisioning Teams users when we factor in manual error?
The costs of human error when provisioning Teams users
With any manual process, there is a risk of human error. The larger the size of the organization, the higher the error percentage will be.
With size comes complexity, and it can be hard for humans to ensure quality.
Error does not mean a script failed to run. Error means that the intended result is not the actual result and causes a user to have a poor experience.
There are many reasons for error. The most common are:
- Inaccurate source data that has been entered incorrectly.
- Data mistakes in input data preparation for scripts and tasks.
- Sub-standard quality through poor training, negligence, tiredness, or tedium.
The worst part here is that the process will have appeared to complete successfully. The result will not be known until the user logs in for the first time.
When noticed, the error will be logged as a support ticket and will need to be triaged and resolved manually. This process takes longer as there is extra investigation time and may require more skilled workers to rectify the issue.
The average IT support ticket to resolve a configuration error is approximately $45.
Cost of error (IT Cost – no escalation) | ||||
Item | Resource | Number | Hours | Cost |
Service desk ticket logged | Office Worker | 1.00 | 0.10 | $1.53 |
Ticket triaged & assigned | 1st Line Engineer | 1.00 | 0.20 | $2.97 |
Ticket actioned by engineer | 2nd Line Engineer | 1.00 | 1.50 | $29.01 |
Ticket management | 1st Line Engineer | 1.00 | 0.75 | $11.06 |
Ticket Cost | $44.57 |
This can almost double in cases where escalation is needed to fix the most complicated errors.
Cost of error (IT Cost – with escalation) | ||||
Item | Resource | Number | Hours | Cost |
Service desk ticket logged | Office Worker | 1.00 | 0.10 | $1.53 |
Ticket triaged & assigned | 1st Line Engineer | 1.00 | 0.20 | $2.97 |
Ticket actioned by engineer | 2nd Line Engineer | 1.00 | 1.50 | $40.10 |
Escalation engineer | Specialist Engineer | 1.00 | 1.00 | $19.35 |
Ticket management | 1st Line Engineer | 1.00 | 1.00 | $14.88 |
Ticket Cost | $78.83 |
The cost to IT is only one element. When error is introduced, the impact is felt right across the organization. These are often the hidden costs that we pay little attention to.
And this is dangerous.
The hidden costs of provisioning errors
Each provisioning error impacts a user’s ability to perform their job function. It also impacts their participation within their team, which impacts their colleagues.
When a user is not working to their full potential, the organization suffers and so does its customers.
On average, an IT error equates to around 4 hours of lost productivity for the directly impacted user. This can quickly compound when users realize more than one error has occurred and more resolutions are needed.
An organization impacted by 120 provisioning errors in one month could end up losing more than $25,000 in lost employee productivity. This is on top of the cost to IT.
Other areas to consider
When you factor in staff turnover rate, and we must when assessing business costs like this, we establish the real cost of manual error and lack of automation.
The current average staff turnover in the UK is approximately 36%, and 43% in the US, according to HR Review. An increase of 9% versus previous years.
Using change as a metric, the following cost estimates can be calculated to consider both cost to IT and the loss of business productivity.
Number of Monthly Changes | Cost of Change Per Month | Cost of Change Per Year (ongoing) |
50 | $1,969.42 | $23,633.04 |
100 | $4,088.76 | $49,065.12 |
350 | $16,037.14 | $192,445.68 |
500 | $26,325.15 | $315,901.80 |
1000 | $54,869.11 | $658,429.32 |
Quite a staggering amount, and this doesn’t even include the cost of creating and supporting the scripts used.
But, is this just an accepted cost, or are there savings to be made with the right solution?
Orto is a Microsoft Teams provisioning tool that automates your entire user provisioning process, so you save time, reduce errors, and remove manual inefficiencies.
All you need to do is add your new user’s AzureAD attribute then leave the rest to us.
That means every time you have a new starter, or need to make a move, add, or change, you add assign them a persona and we assign all the relevant policies.
We make it easy to assign policies like these…
App Setup | Channels | Events | Messaging | Video Interop Service |
Audio Conferencing | Compliance Recording | Files | Mobility | Voice Applications |
Call Hold | Emergency Calling | IP Phone | Room Video Tele Conferencing | Workload |
Calling | Emergency Call Routing | Meeting Broadcast | Shifts | Meeting Branding |
Call Park | Enhanced Encryption | Meeting | Survivable Branch Appliance | Dial Plan |
Say, for example, marketing hires 10 interns on the same day as you have a new sales academy of 40 starters. And it just so happens that your operations team has doubled from 25 to 50 to meet the new demand of all your marketing and sales staff.
That’s 100 new users to provision.
It’s one thing coping with the tedium of doing the same task over and over again. But think about the time you could be spending on tasks where you add real value. Think of the time you get back in your day.
And what happens if you make a mistake (we are all human, after all)?
One small mistake, caused by manual data entry, could lead to marketing having access to private documents your accounts team wouldn’t dream of sharing with anyone.
Orto does all the heavy lifting, so you can get on with your job. We even cover when someone changes job roles. There’s no need to revert to manual processes here, either.
Our personal migration tool allows you to easily switch a user’s templated policies to their new location, job type, or department.
These undeniable benefits are why large businesses are moving to auto-provisioning. But the icing on the cake is the change you see when comparing manual provisioning costs versus a fully-automated solution.
The cost of a fully-automated user provisioning solution using Orto
Using Orto as your Microsoft Teams provisioning tool, you could reduce your cost per provisioning ticket by up to 77%.
The average ticket cost plummets from $32.56 down to $7.69.
With no need for user intervention, the process will begin automatically once the user account has been created in AzureAD.
Cost of a new user addition/change | ||||
Item | Resource | Number | Hours | Cost |
HR system input | Office Worker | 1.00 | 0.50 | $7.69 |
Service desk ticket logged | Office Worker | 1.00 | 0.00 | $0 |
Ticket triaged & assigned | 1st Line Engineer | 1.00 | 0.00 | $0 |
Ticket actioned by engineer | 2nd Line Engineer | 1.00 | 0.00 | $0 |
Ticket management | 1st Line Engineer | 1.00 | 0.00 | $0 |
Ticket Cost | $7.69 |
The inevitable caveats
As with any automated solution, success depends on the information fed into it.
If the information is incorrect, the outcome be too. The user account information must be populated correctly to ensure the correct provisioning rule is triggered.
The chance of error, however, will reduce as human involvement is taken out of the process.
This means the cost of rectifying errors is reduced, but more importantly, users have a consistent first-time right experience, which will increase the productivity of the organization.
The opportunity for saving costs on your Teams provisioning is huge.
With the right methodology and implementation of our automation service, you could save more than 80% versus your current provisioning solution.
This final table shows the cost savings realized when introducing Orto versus the previous time using manual processes.
Changes Per Month | Cost of Change Per Month | Cost of Change Per Year (ongoing) | Cost Savings | Percentage Saved |
50 | $407.82 | $4,893.87 | $22782.30 | 82.32% |
100 | $887.28 | $10,647.40 | $42483.06 | 79.96% |
350 | $3,007.87 | $36,094.46 | $160542.55 | 81.64% |
500 | $4,462.66 | $53,551.99 | $266,649.58 | 83.28% |
1000 | $9,237.34 | $110,848.05 | $552,181.91 | 83.28% |
It almost sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? We could barely believe it ourselves when we were speaking to customers.
While working on a potential “new feature” for existing customers, it became extremely clear that auto-provisioning for Microsoft Teams was something we needed to go all-in on.
And we’ve done just that.
If you want to save time and money, while reducing manual provisioning errors, get started with Orto.