Discussion on:

How IT can alienate the very people they serve

IT is instructed as it is told by the higher ups. Nuff said.
Helpdesk is in place to track the work, but ends up being more of a barrier than anything else. A wedge between the IT staff and the clients.

True, the IT Department could hide behind the ticketing system.
However, it is up to the IT staff to make sure that doesn't happen. Accept all forms of help desk requests (ticket, email, phone call, on the floor), keep the requester in the loop, be pleasant and respectful, and you will make the user satisfied with the service.

If someone has difficulty using our helpdesk system, it's my job to figure out why and either (quickly) train them, fix the system, or key in the request for them. They just want their problem solved, not to deal with the helpdesk problem. An IT person who gets on his high horse about it will alienate the users and make IT look bad.

An IT department is also a customer services department. If you want your personnel to value your contribution to the company take down barriers to good service.

Making the repairs quickly is a great concept. But there has to be an adequate number of staff. I work in an IT department that has 3000+ computers and 200+ printers that all need maintenance or repairs. We have 4 staff members to do the work. Most of my work orders are "Overdue." Hiring more staff members will not happen.

Either your SLAs need adjusting or your boss is falling down on the job. At some point, somebody needs to run the numbers and point out that the cost of defective computers and printers is MORE than the cost to hire an additional tech.

My boss keeps putting in for more help. But the school district (did I mention that I work for a school district) says there is no money to hire more help. "Overdue" seems to be a way of life here at the scool.

Ouch. Do you at least get a chance to catch up during the summer break?

If the help desk is dealing with the general public I'd consider them a customer service department. But if they're dealing with other employees I'd rather they spend more time fixing things and keeping things working than trying to provide a good customer experience.
They may be there to fix your printer. But even tough that may be a priority for you, it may not be for the company. They be working on something more important.

A perfect help desk is one I never need to talk too.

NT

One of our goals is to open (and close) as many "by the way" tickets as we can. We open the ticket ourselves, so customers do not have to deal with the help desk, and the customer gets the problem fixed immediately.

The only times we don't open by-the-way tickets is when the initial assessment shows that repair will require parts we don't have in stock or when workload prevents spending additional time at that customer site.

Help desk don't hide behind the ticketing system. They are infront of it. The business is the one hiding behind the ticketing system. A painful convoluted one doesn't help IT at all.

Hiding behind the ticketing system = waiting until the user puts in a ticket before Help Desk will look into the issue.
I would rather have my staff solve minor problems when they hear it as they walk by than tell the user to put in a ticket. Help Desk can put in a ticket when they fix the problem.
I have had Help Desk staff who tried to hide behind the system. They learn very quickly that hiding is unacceptable in my department.

The OP was talking about deliberately hard to use ticketing systems.

Wish you ran our IS dept, there again, if you did, your boss might smack your wrist very hard, for just going around fixing things willy nilly as though that was your job or something...

I have a very demanding boss. Fortunately, he is very supportive as well.
I understood the article. Rather than commiserate, I like to offer solutions.
Any good help desk system should accept emails and voicemail attachments as well as direct entry.
Any good Help Desk Department should have a help desk hotline with all the technicians set up in a hunt group.
Any good Help Desk Technician will accept help desk requests by email, IM, or a conversation in the hall. If they can fix it and are not busy, they fix it on the spot and log it in the ticketing system. If they are busy or they are not capable of fixing it, they log it in and it gets assigned to someone else.
All the technicians have Blackberries so logging in a ticket while on the go is easy.

Consider yourself lucky.

Take note of the instances where there's a tech per 1000 machines....or more. No help desk....no hunt groups. Nothing. And it's not going to change because the leadership doesn't want it to. Costs money. One guy, many sites...on the road.

That guy simply cannot stop for everyone that wants something and wants to circumvent the channels.

Yes...that does happen in the real world.

First of all, if your place has things broken willy nilly, you are putting the carriage in front of the horse! You need an entire IT strategy that works, because the one you (they?) are using doesn't. While there needs to be a sense of priorities, if there is that much in need of doing that a tech cannot take care of something else while he/she is already there, it is a symptom of a broken system.

"...if you did, your boss might smack your wrist very hard..."

Yeah, I totally get this. The person that tries the hardest is usually the one in the most trouble, while the slackers never get noticed or reprimanded. That isn't just IT, that is life in general. (And God Forbid someone actually gets something accomplished...)

Back to the subject:

I am frequently flagged down or waved over while walking through the offices. I would NEVER give someone a rubber stamped reply like "...fill out a ticket..." Sometimes they are asking me for something that is beyond my limited authority to do, and then I will politely explain that and tell them to send an email to my boss about the problem, and it will trickle back to me with instructions how it is to be handled. Otherwise, if it is a software or hardware issue, I most certainly will fix it right away, or arrange to get back to that person. (I might ask them to send me an email as a reminder. I am forgetful like that, and my co-workers appreciate the honesty as much as I appreciate the reminder.)

I am not the primary IT person here, but I am the primary Help Desk person, and I try very hard to make my customers, (my co-workers) satisfied. Our dept. gets calls and emails. We do not use a ticket system. I suppose that if we were larger, it might become a necessary evil, but right now, email for non-urgent jobs, and phone calls for urgent matters. If I am away from my desk, I get the voice mail message and get back to them as soon as I am able.

Have a toke, get your pipes cleaned out, relax...

It was tongue in cheek type english humour.

Tony,

I did get the humor. (---Uncivilized Yank spelling...) I understood exactly what you meant. I liked your post so that is where I added my comments on the subject. Upon re-reading, I should have phrased things a bit differently in the first paragraph. It does sound like I didn't get your humor, but I did.

Michael

"Accept all forms of help desk requests (ticket, email, phone call, on the floor), keep the requester in the loop, be pleasant and respectful, and you will make the user satisfied with the service"

Yes, be respectful, be pleasant, keep the requester up to date. But a formal ticketing process is key to support success. Most importantly if your helpdesk is undermanned (as it is in most companies I've worked for).

Small companies that have maybe 20 or 40 employees, maybe the approach of "anything goes" works, but not when you're dealing with a larger more global company.

For example, what if the support tech is away for a week and they're getting requests for support? If it was in a ticket system, someone else could pick it up. Or what if the technician was working on something just prior to taking their leave? With a ticket system any other tech can view the entire history and get the job done.

The other problem of course is when you try to justify a new tech. It's far easier to show the work being done by reference of tickets than comb through everyone's email, wracking everyone's brains for drive-by support, etc. Tickets show exactly what is being done by the helpdesk, how rapidly support is rendered, who is a common requester, etc.

Last, but not least; a good ticketing system that's properly used by the helpdesk staff also provides a knowledge base for users and for the helpdesk tech who takes the call. Problem loading program ABC with error XYZ? Ah, ok we had that problem last week, solve it by doing DEF.

No it doesn't. We're slightly bigger then the 20 to 40 you mention sire_tim, but not much. A long time ago I managed to get (most) people off the ambush tactics generally used when I first took on the role. On the stairwell I would be sweetness and light, but if it's not logged properly I will simply ignore it (unless it's genuinely something major of course - give and take!)

I would suggest a team of two or three might work with an informal approach to Help Desk support, but teams of any size need efficient management, not a fire fighting approach to problem solving. IT management is all about forward thinking not "it's busted so fix it!"

If I can see trends through analysis of the ticket logs then I can be proactive about resolutions. My job as an IT Manager is to manage IT, not fix problems on a break-fix / headless chicken approach to problem solving because users are too lazy, or simply uneducated to the benefits of logging issues properly.

...needs a good ticket system.

I'm an advocate of OTRS with the ITSM plugins for change management.

If your management thinks you should be doing the "headless chicken" thing....to borrow Tommy's phrase...and responding to every user grab because they don't want a process, I promise you you'll soon be ready to leave that job.

You controlling tech...not the other way around...is what it's about. Having a keyword searchable ticket system, assuming the techs actually document the problems thoroughly, is invaluable to avoid reinventing the wheel for recurring problems, and getting additions to things like your FAQ's.

Of course users don't like it because they want your attention right now. They want to go the head of the line. It's up to management to decide how the priority structure should work. This is usually where the problem is. Management tends to want everything for nothing...just like the rest of us. But scapegoating IT by using the users' lack of technology knowledge is too easy and available to not take advantage of.

And then it;s our fault for using it. I've lost count of the Great new Product that management has been sold without consulting with IT only to find that it's unsuitable for the task but it's IT's Fault that it doesn't work not the Managements or the Vendor who misrepresented it so that they could get a sale.

I saw this back in the days that I worked Mainframes the Sales people said it's a Computer so it will do the job required and that is all that they knew. We have this and have reduced it's price so it's ideal for what you want. Doesn't matter that it uses a different Language to do the job and everything has to be rewritten so it's usable and will cost millions of $.

Management comes down saying we bought you this which cost so many million $ and you want to spend how much on rewriting the software? Or It's a computer so why doesn't it work like the old one that we have just replaced?

You get Management who are only interested in making a Quick Buck who spring for the cheapest option possible and then blame IT when it doesn't work. After all when was the last time a CEO admitted that they messed up and made a mistake rather than saying that the Underlings rejected their "Improvements" and did everything possible to prevent them being successful.

In the case you presented above I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised if Management of the Cloud Provider didn't see IE's as a "Weird" browser with "Strange Nonstandard Operations" so instead of shelling out the necessary funds to rewrite their Interface they just do not support IE and tell all potential customers to use a different browser which is more secure or whatever. It's not to improve your Security or whatever it's to save them the necessary funds of supporting a Browser which sets it's own standards and ignores existing Standards at every opportunity.

Col

Not supporting Internet Exploder is a dumb decision from almost every aspect but I doubt it's because of the "Geek" coefficient of the company. More likely is that the developers have told their manager that implementing the system for all major browsers isn't a linear curve in terms of cost and development time. Then the departmental manager or MD (probably an accountant) has decided that it's too expensive to do all of them so instructs the coders to implement one or two and make it the client's problem.

As to the help desk phenomenon, nobody seems to have ever gotten this right. I know how I'd do it but, once again am forestalled by the financial director because of the costs.

Penny-wise, pound-foolish is the order of the day in contemporary IT.

You sound like a manager frustrated because someone else refused to see things your way Patrick...

Help Desk is not there to make people happy, it's there to avoid wasting your company's money on trivial problems. It's not supposed to be *too* easy, or people will use it even when they're not supposed so.

But of course, striking the right balance between usability and customer satisfaction can be challenging...

...to the person experiencing it.

The IT help desk is there to ensure that all hardware, software, and infrastructure are working properly so company employees can do their job. The minute the employee can't do their job because of an IT problem, IT is costing the company money.

If your help desk considers any outage 'trivial', I'm glad I don't have to deal with it.

Triviality exists. Just ask yourself "how much money my company is likely to loose because of this problem" and you'll realize there *are* trivial problems.

And that's why most helpdesk departements are undermanned. Because it's the easiest solution to make sure you're not going to waste bucks on silly things.

I didn't say there were no trivial outages, I said no outage or problem is trivial to the person experiencing it.

As for the company 'wasting bucks' on silly things, waste is quite often determined by who's on the phone. I've had to waste time placating a division manager who couldn't log on when I should have been in the server room trying to find out why the log-in server was off-line.

"It's not supposed to be *too* easy, or people will use it even when they're not supposed so."
This attitude sums up everything that's wrong with IT departments. Outsourcing of your role can't happen fast enough.

Sometimes new people don't understand what the help desk ticketing is used for.
For example, once we received a help desk ticket that said, "The soap dispenser in the men's room on the 2nd floor is often out of soap. It needs to be refilled more often. Can you do something about it?" After we had a bit of a chuckle in the department, we replied through the ticketing system that our help desk ticketing system is used for computer, peripherals and telephone related issues. We gave him the name of the manager of janitorial services and cc'ed the message to him so that he was made aware. When we heard back from the manager of janitorial services, we closed the ticket.
There's no harm in being polite.
That's what being helpful is all about.

Because outsourcing the helpdesk would cost more. And that's because I'm not focusing on making people happy, but on not wasting my company money.

Sometimes, you have to tell your users "I'm sorry, you can't do that". Sure, they'll bitch around like the OP because things did not went their way.

Life's hard.

And that's because I'm not focusing on making people happy, but on not wasting my company money.

Why can't you do both? They aren't mutually exclusive...

I work for a company in which we often say to the end user to please put in a work order. However, the end users that typically hear that are the ones that contact us on our cell or office phones or through email and expect to jump ahead of the line. The ones that actually call the help desk on a regular basis tend to get helped a lot faster when we get stopped in the hall and asked a question, or get asked to fix something. Our help-desk is manned by an exceptional lady that is very helpful and quickly answers the phone. We also have the ability to send an email for a work order. Either way the work order gets put in right away. If it is critical, one of us or several of us get a call or text about the issue. We, as techs, also have the ability to put the work orders in ourselves when the need arises. I do my best to treat all the users with respect and a diligence to fix their issues as quickly as possibly. I will move around a great deal during the day when things are slow, checking on my end users and seeing if they have any problems that weren't pressing so they just haven't taken the time to call them in. This has established a great repor between myself and the users. I don't mind at all being stopped and asked to fix something when that particular user does their best to follow the protocols and doesn't feel like they are more important than another user and should skip to the front of the line. We are the only ones that know what work orders are in the system and who has the most pressing problem.

Regarding the company with the lack of IE support. If they don't support IE I wouldn't use them either! There are a lot more IE users than any other group just because PC's come with it installed! For a company to specifically not support IE in favor of other browsers, it's ludacris and I can only sit here and shake my head!

But its the management team that shrinks their budget and decides where they spend their money. The problem is not IT, its management who do not understand technology, and who think magical kingdoms and music just happen without any investment.

Another part of the problem is that people these days seem to have grown too accustomed to the "I want it now!" culture, as you express in your writings. Well Mr. Gray, for whatever reasons the vendor had, they did not target your chosen browser. Get over it and move on. Buy somewhere else, or build it yourself. You rant is quite silly, implying they "serve" you. How ridiculous. Its a provider/customer "relationship". Try to understand that.

You're part of the problem Mr. Gray. When you refer to a subset of the professional organization as "geeks gone wild", not only are you demeaning those people, but you are justifying in your mind that its ok to do so because you thought it was popular slang for "those people". You alienate yourself.

You ignorance of technology funding in large organizations shows, as anyone who has ever spent any time whatsoever in corporate IT will tell you that, nearly without exception, funding decisions are not made by IT, and it is a constant point of friction within organizations. The whole lean/six sigma/agile mantras so beloved by penny pinching execs, is most often abused to extract continual pounds of flesh from IT, with the goal of inevitably rendering it ineffective enough to warrant an outsourcing initiative.

Unless and until the executive culture in U.S. companies changes sufficiently, we will continue to fall behind our international competitors who for some reason have learned the lessons of INVESTMENT far better than our current crop of so called "best and brightest".

The truly frightening aspect of this situation is that it is seemingly only getting worse these days. I hope you, and those like you, learn some lessons regarding self reflection, and soon.

is the Imagineers. Disney is a rare bird in that they over-engineer everything they do so that they are prepared for just about everything. Most businesses (including mine) don't include IT in the strategic planning process, hand us projects with poorly defined deliverables, and then wonder why it takes us 14 tries to finally arrive at what they want.

If there is a failure with IT, you'd better look hard at who is ACTUALLY calling the shots. 99 times out of 100 where you have some problem with IT its not IT's fault.

...but some things are the responsibility of the people who do the job, like professionalism and keeping up their knowledge.

My wife's company, a large company with 5000+ employees, has an IT team labeled "The Helpless Desk" due to their inability to actually solve problems. My wife's computer had a loose video card that slowly worked it's way loose, causing sporadic hangs and blue screens and ironically cursor distortion. Do you want to know what they replaced first? The monitor cables. Yup, the monitor cables had to be causing BSODs and Hangs. Sweet Merlin where do they find these people? Finally after them closing multiple tickets with no resolution she had me come in on a weekend and in 5 minutes I had reseated the card and it worked fine afterwards.

Yes, this can be blamed on management as well due to budgetary constraints, but these people are highly paid and it's disappointing to see such lack of performance out of people who are well compensated for their positions.

My experience has been, for better or for worse, PC techs in companies quite often are not highly paid, and, in fact, are often part time high-school kids.

I'll take your word for it, but keep that in mind. I'd also be interested in how many techs this company has servicing 5000 users. I've been in a tech per 1000 machines environment, and I can tell you, the users did not feel like they were getting their due.

Oddly enough, I started my own business and offered small businesses as much time as they wanted to buy, and found out just how little people value technical work.

It is very bizarre. People just expect some person somewhere to be Johnny-on-the-spot the moment things don't go perfectly, but they don't think they should have to pay for it.

With all due respect to Patrick, if companies want to get it right, they can. They don't want to. They don't want to pay for QUALITY IT because they think IT is a disposable commodity. Unfortunately for the workers, it mostly is.

Not where I'm at. Help desk hires around here start at around $12-$13/hour. If you're lucky.

InterKnot Exploiter is not supported because it is not uncommon for it to fail to render a site as you expect. Hence it's not uncommon to require 'hacks' in the code to encourage MS IE to render the site as you desire it appear, and indeed it will appear when opened via Opera, FireFox, Safari, and Chrome.

Rgarding the ticket fiasco, innit the truth? Sadly IT lacks the willingness (?) to have a real person triage calls so an emergency is handled immediately while a non-emergency requires a ticket.

Whatever company you are talking about that doesn't support IE is just stupid and you shouldn't use them. Personally I suggest that everyone move away from IE, but as a web developer I'd be an idiot if I didn't support it on my websites. It's 50 plus percent of web browser usage. Mainly because the average person doesn't know that there's something better out there. Until more people become aware of the alternatives or IE finally gets their act together (yes they are getting better) then any company who doesn't design for IE is potentially setting themselves up to be wiped off the map by their competitors.

As for your issues with the help desk, I'm truly sorry. Most IT departments are under staffed and have little to no budget. A lot of us are single person IT departments and if we immediately helped everyone when they asked we'd never accomplish anything because we'd be moving to a new project before we finished the last one. Walk a mile in my shoes and see if you're still standing.

As a web developer I won't dumb down my site to support IE. Sure you can use it with IE but don't expect the full experience. I'm not going to build a monstrosity because a few people refuse to use a modern standards based browser.

Let's see...
You can start by refering to us as "geeks gone wild".

The majority of us do not like to be refered to as "geeks".
Treating us with respect will go a long way.

Your predicament in which a provider requires a browser other than IE sounds like bad planning. Why anyone would require you to use something other than the most popular browser will come back to bite them.

As for the Help Desk Ticketing situation:
I think you understand why a ticketing system exists so I won't belabor the point. What I will say is that the Help Desk Department can and should make help desk requests easy for the user by enabling several ways to reach the Help Desk.
Our users can enter the ticket directly, email a narrative to the help desk email account, vist the department, email, call, or bump into any one of our IT staff who will help them and log the ticket into the help desk system for them., If no one picks up their phone in the help desk hotline hunt group, their voicemail is automatically entered into the help desk system as a wav file attachment. We have a written triage policy that lets the user know how soon someone will get in touch with them and how soon the problem should take to resolve. My staff will visit the user to resolve their problems rather than do "walk throughs" over the phone. It's not because we don't have tools to fix issues remotely. It is because making my staff to be visible makes the user feel appreciated.
We don't have a pretty boat to transport people to the Help Desk Department but that's only because senior management removed it from the IT budget.

Point taken but IE is no longer has the market share. Chrome will eclipse IE as the dominant browser shortly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers