How Music Can Improve MTTR

You heard it here first or, maybe you didn't...we don't know what you're hearing! What we do know is that the right music can improve your team's issue resolution times by as much as 11%. The concept is simple, implementation is instant, and the details are below!

We've all seen or felt the influence of music in our lives - we see it several times a day in fact. Elevator music to calm you while you're locked in a tiny box with strangers, Light FM-style pop music to keep you wandering through the department store a little longer, hold music while you wait for your ISP to explain why they've charging you an extra $50 this month. Music is every where and depending on your mood and the task at hand, it can make you happy, more patient, and even more productive.

What started off as an internal joke within our team quickly became a study to see how music could impact our lives at work. More specifically, we wanted to know if dramatic movie scores during critical production issues would help us resolve issues faster.

At first, it sounds silly but, think about it for a moment: who doesn't want to play the hero in an over-the-top movie scene? With the right music, even your average production issues can be really exciting and when it'ex exciting, people just work harder.

Read this exchange between a few analysts during a production issue. You'll see it's pretty basic and probably even a little familiar...nothing special...just another day in the IT world of support.

Analyst 1: "I'm seeing some user action degradation..."
Analyst 2: "Looks like it's in the product search results..."
Analyst 1: "It's worse than that...I'm getting a blank page when I try to view my past orders..."
Analyst 2: "That's not good...we should let everyone know...sound the alarm."
Analyst 3: "I don't see what's causing it...does anyone see whats causing it?"
Executive: "Are we down?"
Analyst 2: "Looks like a bad instance..."
Executive: "Can users log in?"
Analyst 1: "I see two instances at max CPU"
Executive: "Should we evict the cache?"
Analyst 2: "This isn't cache-related..."
Analyst 3: "We have to reroute traffic and bounce now. We have to stop the bleeding."
Analyst 2: "The auto-scaling policy should have already started that..."
Analyst 1: "Auto-scaling failed...I think it's a memory leak"
Analyst 3: "I'm doubling the amount of instances till we figure it all out"

​Now, play this sound in a new tab while you read the exchange again...youtu.be/7dCGJXnUlOk?t=94

Find out what your average resolution time or Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) is and then for the next few incidents, play some dramatic music (at a reasonable volume) while you team works to resolve. If your team is as cool as mine, they'll get into it and you'll be a few flashing lights shy of a Hollywood Blockbuster and more importantly, you'll see that MTTR improve.