Blade Watch

I was speaking to Allen over at an enterprise business which has offices around the globe. He is manager of the Desktop Support team, he gets involved when Desktop/Helpdesk haven’t been perceived or been perceived to deliver to user expectations.

Can you tell me about your desktop/laptop estate

We’ve got about 800 desktops and laptops, a mixture of internal users and some external clients which pay us to provide desktop/laptop and helpdesk support for a fixed per user fee. The users range from our CIO and associated VIPs, to the sales team, IT, facilities and back office staff.

It’s a 40% laptop to 60% desktop mix all running mainly Windows XP, with standard office suite of applications and Citrix for different applications both bought in and internally developed ones. We support the hardware, the operating system and the applications, including security patching and anti virus.

The user pays for the computer and then pays an annual support cost irrespective of the number of calls placed. For external users, they pay an annual support fee on a per user basis which includes the laptop and helpdesk services to ensure that they can access the applications and services that they have paid for, though we own the laptop simply so that we can standardize the platform and configuration to reduce call out.

So you emailed me about a problem in which user choice was not necessarily a good thing, can you tell me more?

Sure, it was an issue that I am sure many an IT Manager has experienced. I’ll summarize it.

User logs a call, his laptop is slow, he’s a remote user, a sales guy for one of the business units. Helpdesk take a look and try a few things, they reset the user’s profile delete some temp files, they do the best they can do. The user is unhappy and says the laptop is still too slow for his needs, for presentations and the like. He asks the call to be escalated to desktop support. Desktop support take a look at it, do a hardware inventory and discuss the options:

• Rebuild the laptop – the laptop is on build 4.8 with patches, the current build is 7.3 and it would be quicker with a rebuild – this might extend his laptops life by about 6 months
• Run diagnostics, chkdsk and defragment the laptop, this should rule out any issues and the defrag should make the disk quicker – this would give him maybe a few more months before it got slower again
• Purchase more memory and a new disk for the laptop, however it is out of support and the cost is nearly the same cost of a new laptop
• Replace the laptop, however this involves a £400 charge for the new laptop – this was the recommended option

The sales guy replies that the £400 capex cost would come out of his bonus and therefore he doesn’t want that, can we do something else, he can’t be offline, so if we’re going to do anything he will need sent a laptop whilst he continues working. Can IT please send a courier with a spare laptop whilst his is fixed?

The desktop engineer escalates this to me to ask what to do, so I phone him:

“We have pre-built laptops, they’ve been purchased already so there is no charge in effect, we have to pre-order laptops for new users, can we send you one of these? They’re new and they will be a lot faster.”

No replies the sales guy, “I don’t want to buy a new laptop, it will come out of my bonus”

We assure him it wont, but he doesn’t agree and requests we do what he asks. So I contact our Service Delivery Manager asking what we do, his laptop is a Compaq Evo N400c, (Pentium 850, 256MB RAM, running Windows XP), which is out of support (we now buy Lenovo X200s), this will cost us about £200 in courier fees plus two man days to build and load his user specific data/applications. It is not economic based on the age of the laptop.

In the meantime the sales guy contacts his manager commenting that IT wont fix his laptop, that they’re going on about replacing it when he just needs it fixed. The CIO gets an email from the head of his sales unit asking whats going on and the CIO emails me and the Service Delivery Manager asking what the issue is, and we inform him about the £400 capex issue.

“What issue, just send him a new laptop, I can’t believe we’re having these kind of conversations. Tell him IT will pay it, and also tell him, the laptop is out of warranty, out of support and under no circumstances will be fixed.”

A new Lenovo was configured and couriered to him, the old one returned to us for recycling after the CIO had contacted both the user and his manager which went something like:

We have helpdesk call 00228703 relating to your Compaq Evo laptop. I’ve spoken with the team and informed them that we are not fixing it, nor are we upgrading it. The laptop is six years old and doing anything other than replacing would be uneconomical in support and cost terms.

If we have further issues relating to this call and the need to replace your laptop, I will escalate to the head of your business line about investing in supported equipment.

What do you think the transaction cost was for that call?

I reckon it was a man day in conversations between support teams and the escalation to the CIO, but the issue is not the cost, it’s the lack of information on process on the way it works. That the budgets are fixed, IT has to keep buying new computers to meet new users joining the team, and to provide new laptops or desktops when a user requests them. Because though, the perception was that by purchasing a new laptop, he might affect his bonus, he’s increased our support costs and created extra ‘maintenance’, not that we have a problem with the guy, he’s just doing what he thinks is the right thing for the business, for revenue and in the same respect his bonus.

It’s swings and roundabouts in a way, you see, it wasn’t a financial transaction, the laptops were ordered, had been bought already and were built. It comes down to a choice, you either pay £400 for a new machine, or you pay about the same (in cross charge terms), to have your old one fixed. Long term from an economic standpoint, it’s better to replace than it is to fix in most of our support calls, particularly on the old machines.

What would you like to see?

Establishment of base rules of best practice – someone to say anything over two years old or even three gets binned and not fixed, that we move away from fixing hardware failures – like in the call last week, where someone had dropped their laptop, helpdesk paid £900 in replacing the system board and screen in a £400 laptop, because the user didn’t want to buy another one and it was ’still in support’.

I wonder if we changed the model to include the hardware if the user would ever debate getting a new laptop or desktop, you’d be surprised how often that happens. Only last week we had a similar thing with one of the managers, his desktop a Dell OptiPlex G150 had a failing hard drive, and he was asking if we couldn’t fix it, “rather than go through the hassle, of buying a new machine”, not understanding the internal costs of having an engineer sit there, order a new hard drive from Dell, fit it and then re-install Windows plus everything else which might take him a day or two due to the age of the machine and the fact that we no longer had a build for that machine as IT had ‘decommissioned’ that platform of pc.

Related posts:

1. Complexity in the IT part 2 and why we can’t deliver In terms of process and delivery, there are so many...
2. Desktop virtualization – some thoughts/how we did it I was having an interesting chat with one of my...
3. Running IT as a business I got this email yesterday from a colleague working for...
4. Some thoughts on the virtual desktop Computerworld Computerworld – Jeff Allison’s company is considering desktop virtualization,...
5. How to benchmark IT delivery part 2 The IT directors’ replies were as follows: Time taken to...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.