The problem with support
Steve Jobs
This morning when I got to work I was excited about a light day of work during what is usually a slow time of the year. As soon as I turned the corner to go into my office I knew that was not going to be the case. Some of the buildings on campus had no network connectivity and our phones were lighting up. This isn't too big of a deal except people were also trying to go around us for support and that just makes it harder for us to get the problem taken care of. I guess that is the norm. The biggest problem was that while this was going on our network access control (NAC) system started to freak out on several people's computers across campus.
Our NAC is something I am so looking forward to when it is fully online, but right now we are still in the phase of working out the bugs. I worry about the problems we are having with it because the potential of the NAC is so great, but keeping employees excited about what it can offer us is getting harder and harder. I know that if our staff doesn't see it as anything but problems then they will not be able to back it 100% and we have to. I know that tele-com is working as hard as they can to make sure there are no problems and hopefully things are going to smooth out soon.
The other side of this coin is that we are not the ones who run the NAC, yet we are it's face and support. This creates a friction point when something goes wrong. And I cannot say that this is a NAC only opportunity, because many of the systems on campus are like this. Clients call us because there is a problem, we troubleshoot and run into a roadblock, and the client is angry because we are forcing them to use this system, yet cannot help them. We have to escalate to the engineers, for lack of a better term, because we do not have access to really see what is happening. This is not a problem of our server admins and software developers not wanting to give us the tools we need, but is much more a culture problem.
When a new system goes online there is very little thought to how the helpdesk will be able to support it. We have so many projects and so little time and resources that some corners are skipped to get the job mostly done. I am trying very hard to come up with some sort of proposal, contract, etc that we as the support desk can give to our back line support that will hopefully see that this skipped corner means that the project is not ready to go. It is not ready for prime time. I know a lot of you that read my blog work in support jobs, and I would like to ask if you have any input about how to affectively manage a culture shift. I know this is a long term project, but I am going to make it a goal for at least a start of change this summer.