Blade Watch

I’ve been speaking with Chris over the last few days to see how he is down in sunny Canary Wharf and I admit to see if his organization is recruiting, (I’m looking for work), anyway one of the things I was talking to him was about how IT recruitment and training is progressing. He was telling me the organization he works at was offering him more training on SMS or in Project Management, and I was asking him if we didn’t need to move training away from the technical arm towards more community, service orientated and interpersonal skills. He was not impressed, “less technical, but I’m a technical engineer”, yes but you see if I ask a Windows engineer (Chris) to look after some Linux servers (which is what happened to Chris at work), he went home, took a spare laptop or a virtual machine, downloaded RedHat and started using it. He might not have been enterprise specialized, or certified to the official standards, but within a week, he could manage services, create new disk partitions, create new user accounts and check the logs, the core activities he needed to perform.

But as we’re faced with cloud, with outsourcing, with an ever changing way of doing business, with more required from less, we need to manage expectations, manage our clients if you like, for this we need our technical teams to leave their technical desks, start communicating with the end user community. Enter a dialog if you like, be seen as permanently available, permanently improving your infrastructure, understanding your application, managing incidents, requests and changes to application and infrastructure like that task is the centre of their universe, to in essence add value. Be the difference between “..computer says no.. I can ping it, the server’s fine, (leave me to my MCSE book), because increasingly adding value whether it’s responding to calls within the SLA (playing the game if you will), not defending your corner or blaming other departments, but working as a unified IT team delivering service and adding value is where we should be going.

I’ll give you my favourite example to illustrate this: (the user was a senior business manager)

User phones IT and says his mouse is broken, the right click function doesn’t work, help desk log a call, engineer presses respond, leaves it for a few days without speaking to the user. User chases the call, helpdesk send an email to the team copying in the end user. Engineer ignores it because he’s busy. Helpdesk chase the team again, engineer turns up, visits the user looks at the mouse, tries it and says, “it appears your right mouse button is broken, we don’t have any computer mice in stock, (he hasn’t checked and in any case believes the end user should pay their true cost), you will need to raise a purchase order for a new HP USB scroll mouse.” User asks how long this will take, well we’ll close this incident and raise a request for a new mouse purchase call, that’ll be a few weeks (he then meets his SLA).

A new call is raised for the purchase of a new HP USB Scroll mouse with the specified part number for the Compaq Evo desktop. The call is passed to desktop to check compatibility, it waits a few days, an engineer turns up, looks at the pc and goes, well it’s got USB, that’ll work fine, asks the user if there is a particular mouse he requires, user says “just one with right click”, engineer fills in the form, passes the call to purchasing.  Purchasing send out a purchase quotation request for a computer mouse, requesting specifically this part number, this particular USB Scroll Mouse in that particular colour as per the request, and get a quote for £45. They then create a purchase approval form for them to order the mouse if the manager is happy to pay the cost.

It’s been 12 working days since the original incident . In the meantime, the user calls help desk, “I have a Logitech USB mouse which I bought at PC World, can I use that? I really want a working right mouse button”, help desk ask user to wait, call the engineer, “Sorry a Logitech mouse wont work, you can only use official devices with your pc, we have to use a HP mouse, besides Logitech mice are not supported under the support contract, we must use supported devices”. The following email is sent:

“Dear…

Your purchase request for a HP USB Scroll Mouse in carbon part number DC172B is with purchasing, call number 00148673. (The link contains the mouse specifications)

The Logitech mouse is not compatible with your HP PC.

Additionally, the mouse is not covered by our support contract and it is against IT policy to plug in external devices which are not validated by IT Security and IT Support.  We can submit your device for electrical testing, and then have it validated against the desktop build to check the drivers and software are compatible.  Please advise me how you would like to proceed.

Kind regards

Jane

Customer Delivery Specialist

Help Desk Team

Meanwhile, the users’ manager who runs the front office trading team, gets a purchase approval request looks at it, “£45 for a mouse? That’s expensive, why so much? I’m not paying that, why can’t IT just give me a mouse?” and rejects it. User is told electronically that his mouse has not been approved, gets upset and emails the universe saying that IT are rubbish. The CIO gets an email from the head of trading asking do we have a mouse, CIO calls head of desktop support and demands a mouse is taken to the user, asking “do we have any computer mice?”, “of course, about 35 of them, we just got new pcs delivered, I’ll take one down to the user right now”

In the case above, we were teaching our IT teams about cost centres, about users paying their true cost, about delivering through the process and meeting service level agreements, about ‘playing the game’, and in essence of following technical processes. The engineer technically was not wrong, IT standards stated that you could not plug in devices that weren’t authorised by IT security, and they need to be tested for health and safety, the existing computer mouse was beyond economical repair and not covered by warranty, technically and operationally a new mouse should be purchased. Technically installing a Dell mouse would require you to install Dell drivers or software which is not part of the desktop build, so the drivers would need tested and packaged.

However, had we changed the mindset from technical, from cost center and paying their true cost to one of delivery, reducing the support cost, it would have been apparent that:

• Two calls had been logged
• Two engineers had spent about an hour of their time
  • One looking at the original incident – right mouse doesn’t work
  • Another checking the pc model, checking the mouse part number, discussing the specifications with the user, did they want an optical mouse, did they want more than two buttons, did they want USB, their pc also supported PS2, also did the colour of the mouse matter, they come in carbon or black.
• Purchasing had created a purchase request, had got three independent quotes for a HP USB Scroll Mouse and created an online approval request for the mouse
• The CIO had been diverted from strategy, from delivering value to the business and got told, your priority is to get Bill a new HP USB Scoll mouse

We have in essence:

• Duplicated effort
• Created internal cost and workloads
• Damaged end user perception of delivery, of being obstructive rather than adding value

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