A helpless desk

Dear Bob …

I have a friend in executive IT support at the company I work for as a Senior IT architect. He continuously is praised for his performance and attitude by clients, and his willingness to go the extra mile to deliver good service (even to go to people’s homes to help with their home setups on weekends).

The problem seems to be that because he goes the extra mile, he will go outside the bounds of ‘the IT support process’ to get the job done. He won’t always go through the ticketing system – most executives page him directly. The executives don’t want to deal with the call center, they want to deal with him. But IT support also issues him regular tickets (so he has the dual role of supporting executives and processing regular tickets).

IT support has a very bad reputation within the company, and are trying to control support through very extensive metrics. They repeatedly grind down on him and the other support staff to work through the system, while his clients are asking him to work outside the system. Unfortuantely, his clients, who don’t like the IT support center and field services in general, are simultaneously asking for better metrics from all of IT support.

This situation causes tremendous morale problems with him and the rest of the support staff: he gets praised, does a great job, but gets only satisfactory reviews from his managers because he operates outside of the process. He is told that “we can’t give you more than a satisfactory because then you don’t belong in this job role”. So he has no upward mobility whatsoever, no matter how well he performs.

The final straw that led me to write this email is a recent thread I witnessed from the CIO down through the ranks: an executive praised his performance, which was forwarded to the CIO, and trickled down to his line manager. His line manager’s words were: “Wanted to pass on the attached note of appreciation and simultaneously remind you that I can’t quantify or justify good work being done if it is not ticketed in a timely fashion. Thank you for your efforts to support our clients and please do your best to maintain currency with your tickets.”

Is this the way to motivate someone? To commend them and slap them in the same sentence? So, my question to you is: IT support centres and field services are renowned for being the IT equivalent of salt mines. Is there a solution for IT support centers to deliver quality support to executives without burdening people with heavy metrics, process, and politics? Is there a balance that can be achieved, in your experience – Or is this just wishful thinking?

– Slave to the grind

Dear Slave …

The situation you describe has several dimensions to it. There’s no magic bullet that will fix it. Depending on whether the help desk manager is flexible and interested in improving the situation, there are either several ways to make it better, or none.

The root cause, as best I can tell from your description, is that your company has a dispatch-oriented help desk. These rarely work. Give an end-user a choice between a help desk that issues a ticket number and the promise of a call back within some defined service level, and an analyst who can provide immediate help. When encouraged to call the help desk, the end-user will logically ask, “What’s in it for me?”

One solution is to simply enforce use of the help desk, which is what your company is shading toward by penalizing analysts who accept calls from outside the system. End-users now logically say, “IT could provide help on the initial call but chooses not to. Instead they’ve added a layer of bureaucracy that helps them but not me.”

A much better approach is a resolution-oriented help desk organized to provide three-tiered support. Tier one is handled by the analysts who answer the phones. Tier two is also telephone support, but escalated to more senior analysts. Tier three support is provided by whoever in IT is needed to resolve the problem, whether by telephone, deskside visit, server reconfiguration, or whatever else is needed.

Typically, resolution-oriented help desks try to resolve 80% or so of all calls with tier-one support and 80% of the rest with tier-two support. With this success rate, end-users see benefit from calling the help desk and most of the issues you report go away. It is, by the way, less expensive to organize this way than to continue with a dispatch-oriented help desk, as the latter assigns problems to expensive analysts that could be handled by entry-level staff.

If this isn’t feasible in your company, it should be possible for analysts receiving calls from high-clout end-users to accept the calls and log them into the problem management system just as the help desk does. This provides the tracking and metrics management wants, helps the analysts manage their workload better, and still delivers the level of satisfaction demanded by the executives who are bypassing the system.

If even this isn’t possible, analysts certainly should be in a position to call the help desk to report problems and resolutions on behalf of the executives who called them directly.

It absolutely makes sense to insist that all reported problems be logged and tracked through a common system. Without this, it’s impossible to determine how much support staff IT needs; it’s difficult to spot recurring problems that require root cause analysis; and it’s easy for reported problems to be forgotten.

It’s easy, though, for the tracking and metrics to become the point of the exercise, rather than the fringe benefit of an improved problem-resolution process.

– Bob

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