One on ones

One on ones are crucial for obtaining feedback on how employees are doing and also giving them feedback. I've found some templates and podcasts that look interesting on this subject.

http://www.manager-tools.com/one-on-one-key-points-and-template/

Getting the team talking through The Daily Scrum

Communication is key to a Service Desk - team members need to feel comfortable exchanging ideas about how to solve problems. However, working in a flexitime working environment, one by one the members of the team crawl into work. Some start studiously looking through their email. Others put on their headphones as they get on with their work for the day. In an apathetic environment like this, the practise of having a Daily Scrum meeting becomes the heartbeat to kicking off talking and chatter among the team for the rest of the day.

The Daily Scrum is a concept taken from Agile Scrum project management method used most frequently for software development. There are plenty of articles on the Internet that describe how it works, like here and here, as well as articles on how it does not work. In essence it is a daily round circle, stand-up meeting where each member of the team goes around in a circle and tells the team what they have been working on since the previous daily scrum, what they plan on working until the next one and any blockages they have to completing any work.

Unlike long running projects, a Service Desk environment is based on incidents so it is often difficult to predict what team members are going to be working on. However, the meeting acts as a useful way for members to synchronise with the rest of the team, giving everyone greater visibility of each others' work and providing an opportunity for them to help each other. Particularly when there are major incidents, the meeting keeps everyone focused and aware of progress.

A glimpse of a slick, professional team

I consider note taking to be a key behaviour of members of a world class service management desk. Note taking while investigating issues creates an audit trail that easily gives the engineer working on an issue, as well as others in the team, a trace of how something has been investigated. It allows others to be included on the investigation, allowing them to make contributions.

Without the key behaviour of note taking, the service management desk becomes prone to common problems that frustrate stakeholders of less well managed service desks:

• Lack of visibility of issues raised by end users
• Engineers progressing issues in isolation and difficulty in tracking the progress they have made on issues
• Difficulty in different engineers picking up and progressing issues worked on by other engineers
• Difficulty in work done by an engineer to be peer reviewed and retrospectively reviewed
• Over-reliance on specific engineers for specific tasks

I am currently building a service desk team, with many members of the team inherited from elsewhere. Getting their adoption of the note taking practise has been slow to happen, but today I've started to see a glimpse of the kind of slick, professional team we are working towards: able to pass issues between engineers easily, with clear visibility to anyone interested of the technical investigation done and confidence in the capability of the team rather than individuals.

Specifically, the glimpse that I "saw" was that

• Engineer 1 completed some work to build a new server to a very particular specification. He had recorded the details of his investigation on the ticket that was raised, #12. At first glance, the notes on the ticket seem excessive and as though not much thought had gone into them. They usually never are excessive and that there are notes always is the key, not necessarily the quality. The build of the server took almost 3 weeks to complete, between Engineer 1 working on other things.
• Recently, almost 3 months later, a similar request, #354, came in for machine of the same specification to be built. In the past the engineer picking up the issue would have had to reinvestigate and re-determine how to build such a machine. In fact, the task of building this machine might have fallen to the same engineer who had previously worked on the issue, as that engineer might remember some of the details of what they had done 3 months previously in the previous occurrence.
• However, because there are sufficient details on #12, a new engineer (Engineer 2) was able to pick up the new ticket, #354, and complete the work for the new server. I'm sure he sought clarification from Engineer 1 on some things, but there is enough in #12 to confidently work on this new similar issue on his own. He was also able to complete the work for ticket #354 quicker than the time taken to complete #12 – days rather than weeks. This is because he did not have to do any rework or reinvestigation done for #12.
• This alone I thought was a great improvement in working practises…. But it gets better! Engineer 2 was away today and a further request was made on #354 by the user who logged the issue. In the past, this might have had to wait for Engineer 2 to return to work because no one would have been quite sure of what had been done. However, Engineer 2 had also made notes on #354 as he progressed the issue meaning a third engineer, Engineer 3, could respond to this and progress the issue further.

We still have some way to go for stories like this being true of every incident that we deal with. However, I think it is encouraging that we are now starting to the note taking behaviour being adopted and the benefits of this.

Customer Service Reviews

When I was a Support Engineer, my manager would make a point of visiting as many customers as possible to find out what they thought of the department's service. He would not just visit the senior managers at the customer, but more importantly he would want to talk to the people who used the service of the Support Department on an every day basis. At the time, when he would do all this, I would think to myself, "Are these visits necessary? Surely it is obvious whether you are providing a good service or not". Later on, when I managed the department, it became apparent that I sometimes did not have sufficient visibility of the pain experienced by the customers or even how and why they were using the service of the Support Department in a particular way.

I'm five months into my current role in a new company and I am realising that these kinds of "Service Reviews" are more important than ever. It is easy to drop into a false sense of security, because the "customers" for this Service Desk are internal. I speak to the managers and team leads of these "customers" regularly, but I am only now realising that I don't get from them the full detailed picture or understanding of the customer's requirements.

The elements I am covering in these reviews include:

• How the customers find dealing with the Service Desk. Some of the typical feedback I have got includes things like "not being given estimates of how long things will take;this means the customer is not sure whether to get on with other work"
• Frustrations the customers are finding with the applications/services supported by the Service Desk. Feedback in this area includes issues relating to the instability of the applications and certain reoccurring incidents in the infrastructure.

The feedback from these areas feeds into the continual improvement of the Service Desk. Ultimately, it does not matter how elegant the infrastructure is or how well things work - the real measure of your success is dependent entirely on what your customers think of you.

Cultural Change: The most fundamental task. The most difficult task?

It is one thing to talk about "best practises". It is quite another to have them implemented and working effectively within a team or organisation. Since the end of June, when I took a team on to shape and mould into an Operations team, perhaps the most striking problem has been some members' shear resistance to adopting new working practises. This has to be a problem in any organisation attempting to improve.

In particular, I want the team to make notes on their incident investigations. There are a multitude of reasons for this, such as allowing other engineers to review and continue the work if necessary and allowing the notes to be reviewed retrospectively if similar incidents occur in future.

My first and default method for getting the engineers to follow this practise was to tell the team quite simply what my expectations were and that we should be doing with respect to taking notes. This was enough for one of the team of 5 to take it all on board and start working as expected.

I then worked through some problems and showed how this could be of benefit. No further engineers were swayed to this new way of working.

The next step was to organise a "training". In this, I invited the users of the Operations teams - project manager, developers and others who would be using the services of the Operations team. I asked them to tell me what they thought would make a great Operations team. They came up with suggestions like "knowledge sharing in the team", "clear idea of where an investigation is and the process". I then went through how I would investigate a problem using this note taking working practise and how this satisfied their requirements. Almost all the users liked what they saw and approved.

The training had an interesting affect - one of the engineers requested to change teams soon afterwards, leaving a team of 4. The others became more convinced of the usefulness, but after an initial stab at trying the new method, soon reverted to their old ways.

After a major incident, a retrospective was held and some of the same themes re-emerged: the need to knowledge share, the need for more logging/notes on the investigation. These themes came from the team members themselves, yet still behaviours have not changed and the working practises have not been adopted.

During and after other incidents, users have sent emails relating to these same points and themes. The team members have seen these mails, yet still continue to work in the same way.

Changing working practises and creating a working environment where this is possible has now become the major and most fundamental issue. Everything else, such as what kind of things are "best practise" or IT Service processes, is a secondary issue.