One big challenge when dealing with user support is around time management. Years ago I read a book called Time Management for System Administrators by Thomas Limoncelli. This was a great book at the time because opened my eyes for a concept of huge importance that I only came to fully understand when I started to study TPS and Lean.
In this book the author insisted in the idea that it is the system administrator's responsibility to talk to users and gather their requests. He called it The Check-in-with-Customers Walk-around, and his idea was inspired by a coworker that used to visit and talk with all users every day.
When I first started to use this idea I was the only tech support in an office of around 60 people. After a few weeks, the first thing I realized was the amount of time that I had freed.I was really surprised by that, so I started to think, how could I have more free time, if actually I was spending more time to talk to people ?
After I put some thought on it I realized that getting the issue beforehand, when I came to talk with the users, allowed me to better organize my work and priorities. In the end, I had lots of free time to do stuff like research, improvements, playing video-game, at the same time that work was all done and users were happy.
People will only search for solutions and help when they actually need it. It is normal for people to be focused on different issues and only realize that they need your help when it becomes urgent. When it becomes urgent, you have little time to deal with it, and in most cases you will have to handle the user's frustration. By talking to them in a regular basis you reach their needs before it becomes a problem. This give you more time to solve the problem. Also allows you to organize your work in a way it becomes more optimal, resulting in free time to invest in other activities.
After doing this for years I learned a few tricks that can actually help a lot gathering the right information from users. For instance, if you just walk by and ask if "everything is ok ?" the reply most likely will be a nod and people will say it "is all good". The reason is because they are not focused on your question. You need to break the focus on what they are doing and force them to focus on your question. When I visit tables nowadays, I first ask how is everything. People will say, it is fine most times. Then I start to get specific about questions. How is the internet ? We upgraded the link, did you noticed difference ? How are the meeting rooms ? How is your laptops ? Is your project needing something ? Usually after shooting a few of this questions, something will surface. The questions induce them to really think about it making it easy to remember what they need. I take notes on every request and they all go to my backlog. This is the main way we collect requirements.
After doing this consistently for some time, users will get used to it. Many times I saw they organizing their needs to report them during the walks that we perform in the office. Also this discourages them to search a solution by themselves. In a classical ticket systems, where users need to send emails or call a service desk, it is not unusual for users to try to solve the issues by themselves instead of going thru the bureaucratic process of opening a ticket. This can have many negative impacts in our work:
In this book the author insisted in the idea that it is the system administrator's responsibility to talk to users and gather their requests. He called it The Check-in-with-Customers Walk-around, and his idea was inspired by a coworker that used to visit and talk with all users every day.
When I first started to use this idea I was the only tech support in an office of around 60 people. After a few weeks, the first thing I realized was the amount of time that I had freed.I was really surprised by that, so I started to think, how could I have more free time, if actually I was spending more time to talk to people ?
After I put some thought on it I realized that getting the issue beforehand, when I came to talk with the users, allowed me to better organize my work and priorities. In the end, I had lots of free time to do stuff like research, improvements, playing video-game, at the same time that work was all done and users were happy.
People will only search for solutions and help when they actually need it. It is normal for people to be focused on different issues and only realize that they need your help when it becomes urgent. When it becomes urgent, you have little time to deal with it, and in most cases you will have to handle the user's frustration. By talking to them in a regular basis you reach their needs before it becomes a problem. This give you more time to solve the problem. Also allows you to organize your work in a way it becomes more optimal, resulting in free time to invest in other activities.
After doing this for years I learned a few tricks that can actually help a lot gathering the right information from users. For instance, if you just walk by and ask if "everything is ok ?" the reply most likely will be a nod and people will say it "is all good". The reason is because they are not focused on your question. You need to break the focus on what they are doing and force them to focus on your question. When I visit tables nowadays, I first ask how is everything. People will say, it is fine most times. Then I start to get specific about questions. How is the internet ? We upgraded the link, did you noticed difference ? How are the meeting rooms ? How is your laptops ? Is your project needing something ? Usually after shooting a few of this questions, something will surface. The questions induce them to really think about it making it easy to remember what they need. I take notes on every request and they all go to my backlog. This is the main way we collect requirements.
After doing this consistently for some time, users will get used to it. Many times I saw they organizing their needs to report them during the walks that we perform in the office. Also this discourages them to search a solution by themselves. In a classical ticket systems, where users need to send emails or call a service desk, it is not unusual for users to try to solve the issues by themselves instead of going thru the bureaucratic process of opening a ticket. This can have many negative impacts in our work:
- Sometimes user solutions ignores important aspects as cost, security, monitoring and availability.
- You will never know for sure the real demand you have, once some problems are solved by users.
- Many times those solutions do not follow standards, but still the users will ask for you to help with their solution whenever they have an issue with it.
- They are spending time in a activity that is not their focus. This could have business impact on the project they are working.
Another element behind this practice is the fact that it approaches the clients and the support team. Email addresses and phone numbers are too distant and many times the user would like to have a face associated with the issue. It is psychological, but must people would rather know the person who is helping them. If they can have the person's contact number even better. Most times it will not come to a point where people will actually call you, but it works to increase confidence and the security sense.
Here in our company we started with the walks once every week and now we are increasing into twice every week (Tuesdays and Fridays).
Also you can assign different members of your team to collect the requirements from different teams in your company. This can be used in larger offices and whenever you have remote clients.
It is not important who will solve the issue, but it is important who is responsible to gather it and keep track of the status. This can be simply done during the daily standup meeting.
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