Work Type Distribution: Understanding What Your Support Team Actually Does

In IT Service Management (ITSM), it’s easy to assume that “support” just means resolving incidents or fulfilling service requests. But the reality is often much more complex. Support teams handle a broad mix of work types — from reactive firefighting to planned project tasks and knowledge sharing.

That’s where work type distribution comes in. It gives you a clear picture of how your team’s time and effort are actually being spent. This insight is essential for understanding performance, setting realistic expectations, and making smart decisions around staffing, prioritisation, and improvement.

What Is Work Type Distribution?

Work type distribution is the breakdown of the different kinds of work your support team handles on a regular basis. It helps you answer key questions like:

• How much of our time is spent on incidents vs. service requests?

• What portion of effort goes into projects, maintenance, or improvement work?

• Are we spending too much time on repetitive tasks that could be automated?

• How much capacity is being consumed by meetings, training, or admin?

You can categorise work by ticket type, task type, or even time-tracking data — whatever gives you the clearest view of what’s going on behind the scenes.

Why It Matters in ITSM

Understanding work type distribution helps ensure that your support function is delivering value in line with expectations. It ties into several core ITSM practices:

• Service Desk / Incident Management – Tracking how much time is spent resolving issues

• Service Request Management – Measuring fulfilment effort and identifying standardisation opportunities

• Change Enablement / Project Participation – Capturing unplanned vs. planned work balance

• Continual Improvement – Identifying areas where automation or process improvements can free up team time

• Workforce and Capacity Planning – Matching team skillsets and availability with demand

It also supports the ITIL 4 guiding principle of optimise and automate by helping identify work that’s repeatable, low-value, or ripe for delegation or automation.

How to Analyse Work Type Distribution

To start, categorise your team's work into logical types, such as:

• Incidents

• Service requests

• Project work

• Maintenance / BAU

• Training and development

• Admin or internal tasks

• Improvement initiatives

• Standby / on-call time

Then, gather data from time-tracking tools, ticket categories, calendar logs, or team journals. You can present the distribution as:

• A percentage breakdown (e.g. 50% incidents, 20% project work)

• A time-based view (e.g. hours per category per week)

• A trend view over months or quarters

Tools like Jira, ServiceNow, or Power BI can visualise this data clearly for different audiences.

Real-World Example: Uncovering the Hidden Load on a Support Team

A large internal IT support team in a healthcare organisation was under pressure to reduce incident resolution times. Leadership assumed that most of the team’s capacity was tied up in break-fix activity.

But when they performed a work type distribution analysis, they found:

• Just 35% of team time was spent on incidents.

• 25% was consumed by service request fulfilment — many of which were repetitive manual tasks.

• Another 20% was allocated to supporting a major internal project, with frequent context switching.

• The remaining 20% went to training, meetings, and admin.

Armed with this data, the team made several changes:

• Automated and delegated routine service requests to a tier 1 team

• Rebalanced project work across the wider IT department

• Created dedicated “focus days” for incident work, reducing context switching

As a result, incident resolution times improved without needing to increase headcount — just by better understanding and aligning how work was being distributed.

💡 Tips for Managing Work Type Distribution

• Review distribution regularly: Especially when team performance is under pressure.

• Automate low-value work: Identify repetitive tasks that can be streamlined or shifted.

• Make invisible work visible: Admin, project support, and context switching often go unnoticed — until they’re tracked.

• Use distribution data in planning: Factor in all work types when forecasting capacity or justifying resource needs.

• Communicate with stakeholders: Help leadership understand the full scope of what your team delivers, not just the ticket counts.

Final Thought

Work type distribution gives you the real story of what your team is doing — not just what’s being logged as a ticket. It empowers better decision-making, more accurate performance assessments, and stronger alignment between effort and value.

When combined with other metrics like capacity, SLA achievement, and volume trends, it creates a well-rounded view of support team performance in any ITSM environment.