Dear Users… (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people) Part 10

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JoeMorgue said:
When people move desk (which the do way too often for no reason but that's neither her nor there) I move IT equipment. I do not move anything else.

Like I honestly do try to maintain a good working relationship with my users but I'm not "the help." I don't work for your company. My company has a contract with your company for me to perform very specific actions.

I'm not the janitor, I'm not the on call "there's a spider in the bathroom" guy, I'm not the electrician, I'm not the "Do things on my computer that are my job but I never bothered how to do" guy.

So do not make some backhanded appeal to "We're both on the same team" because we're honestly not.
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What a terrible lack of teamgetherness and syngergisticism! Why, in those situations, the proper and professional thing to do is say "Twenty bucks." If they decline, mutter "I know what your car looks like" and slink off. They'll think twice about ad hoc requests from now on. And isn't that the goal of support? To get people to stop calling for it? Mission accomplished!
 
I just told someone "Claudia handles those things" and now he won't bother me again. I don't know who Claudia is. I don't think there even is a Claudia here. But I performed helpful service so the requestor is satisfied, and I prevented myself from having to possibly do something, so I'm satisfied. Claudia, if and when she exists, may not be satisfied, but I can't be responsible for other people's happiness, even if they exist. That would be too big a burden.
 
TragicMonkey said:
What a terrible lack of teamgetherness and syngergisticism! Why, in those situations, the proper and professional thing to do is say "Twenty bucks." If they decline, mutter "I know what your car looks like" and slink off. They'll think twice about ad hoc requests from now on. And isn't that the goal of support? To get people to stop calling for it? Mission accomplished!
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Very good point. Apparently some people want us to think of people at work as "customers" and what do customers do? Complain Pay!
 
We refer to "clients". I was told many years ago that some people objected to being called "users" (despite the TRON reference) so for a long time I avoided that term. I think people are less precious about it now.
 
arthwollipot said:
We refer to "clients". I was told many years ago that some people objected to being called "users" (despite the TRON reference) so for a long time I avoided that term. I think people are less precious about it now.
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I think they're better off not knowing what I call them.
 
I just found out that we're shifting to the ServiceNow environment in 5 weeks. 5 weeks! :eek: I was expecting next year.

I am also given to understand that it is not ready. Not five weeks away from being ready, at least. The TLs and management have been doing UAT and it appears to be frustrating.
 
arthwollipot said:
I just found out that we're shifting to the ServiceNow environment in 5 weeks. 5 weeks! :eek: I was expecting next year.

I am also given to understand that it is not ready. Not five weeks away from being ready, at least. The TLs and management have been doing UAT and it appears to be frustrating.
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Hi from the SN salt mine!
 
Another day, another hell client who was suddenly a lot less hellish when I was speaking to them.

This may be my superpower.
 
arthwollipot said:
I just found out that we're shifting to the ServiceNow environment in 5 weeks. 5 weeks! :eek: I was expecting next year.

I am also given to understand that it is not ready. Not five weeks away from being ready, at least. The TLs and management have been doing UAT and it appears to be frustrating.
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This is the most common mistake I see.

SN can be a very powerful tool, and provide enormous efficiencies, but it takes careful planning and solid groundwork to be truly useful. I see a LOT of companies jumping to it without those plans and groundwork, then complaining about how awful it is (which is because of the poor implementation).

Most of the issues I see are, #1 by far, an inconsistent CMDB and a lack of policies/procedures to keep it accurate. Without that, SN isn’t much more useful than any ticketing system.

SN is NOT just a help desk ticket system. In a mature implementation, it’s a combination of asset management, configuration management, project management, business lifecycle management, change control, knowledge base, and several other components. It’s power lies in that combination, allowing each system to feed data to other systems, and leverage all functions to assist others.

When we went live at my last job it was the same kind of thing; our license got CA was coming due, so they decided to swap to SN for ticketing early. It took us 3 years to get to past that SNAFU and make SN truly useful. Most of that was cleaning the CMDB, streamlining and optimizing discovery, getting procedures in place for for manual CIs (non-discoverable assets), and data normalization. Once that was mostly done, the system started becoming enormously more useful.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Hellbound said:
This is the most common mistake I see.

SN can be a very powerful tool, and provide enormous efficiencies, but it takes careful planning and solid groundwork to be truly useful. I see a LOT of companies jumping to it without those plans and groundwork, then complaining about how awful it is (which is because of the poor implementation).

Most of the issues I see are, #1 by far, an inconsistent CMDB and a lack of policies/procedures to keep it accurate. Without that, SN isn’t much more useful than any ticketing system.

SN is NOT just a help desk ticket system. In a mature implementation, it’s a combination of asset management, configuration management, project management, business lifecycle management, change control, knowledge base, and several other components. It’s power lies in that combination, allowing each system to feed data to other systems, and leverage all functions to assist others.

When we went live at my last job it was the same kind of thing; our license got CA was coming due, so they decided to swap to SN for ticketing early. It took us 3 years to get to past that SNAFU and make SN truly useful. Most of that was cleaning the CMDB, streamlining and optimizing discovery, getting procedures in place for for manual CIs (non-discoverable assets), and data normalization. Once that was mostly done, the system started becoming enormously more useful.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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++1000. Especially the CMDB, which is what I am working on right now.

Also, having the feature modules separately licensable means penny-pinching organisations leave out critical components, deeming them "not useful just yet". Gah!
 
My company switched to Service Now a few years ago. The switch went okay, but the team responsible for supporting Service Now all quit within two weeks of going live. That seems to hint there was some drama behind the scenes.

And managers never bothered to learn how to do the things they're supposed to do so a lot of tickets languish "awaiting approval". The ones who did learn to click a button mostly do it without reading the tickets they're approving, so they scream at you later for doing work they approved but didn't want done. But that's not unique to SN.
 
TragicMonkey said:
I just told someone "Claudia handles those things" and now he won't bother me again. I don't know who Claudia is. I don't think there even is a Claudia here. But I performed helpful service so the requestor is satisfied, and I prevented myself from having to possibly do something, so I'm satisfied. Claudia, if and when she exists, may not be satisfied, but I can't be responsible for other people's happiness, even if they exist. That would be too big a burden.
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Personally I'd have avoided "Claudia". I prefer something a little more generic, like "Kathy" or "whats-her-name, her with the browny-blonde hair".

Wudang said:
Very good point. Apparently some people want us to think of people at work as "customers" and what do customers do? Complain Pay!
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They also get ignored a lot.

arthwollipot said:
We refer to "clients". I was told many years ago that some people objected to being called "users" (despite the TRON reference) so for a long time I avoided that term. I think people are less precious about it now.
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Thick clients, fat clients or dumb clients?
 
arthwollipot said:
I just found out that we're shifting to the ServiceNow environment in 5 weeks. 5 weeks! :eek: I was expecting next year.

I am also given to understand that it is not ready. Not five weeks away from being ready, at least. The TLs and management have been doing UAT and it appears to be frustrating.
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Norman Alexander said:
Hi from the SN salt mine!
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Not personally familiar with SN, though I've been to several of their events. Good lunches and excellent swag.
 
arthwollipot said:
I just found out that we're shifting to the ServiceNow environment in 5 weeks. 5 weeks! :eek: I was expecting next year.

I am also given to understand that it is not ready. Not five weeks away from being ready, at least. The TLs and management have been doing UAT and it appears to be frustrating.
Click to expand...

Count yourself lucky you're not moving to a new payroll system [wikipedia.org].
 
arthwollipot said:
Another day, another hell client who was suddenly a lot less hellish when I was speaking to them.

This may be my superpower.
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I hate it, but I've determined my superpower is that I exude something that causes unwarranted belief that things are going okay. I can put up with it when it's something that I actually know and work with. But when it's outside my field, I feel dirty.

I do Unix work, some python stuff, used to do a ton of storage. I can probably create a table in a SQL database and do a lookup, but I am *not* a DBA. A client of ours had a few of our staff on contract. One of the other jobs was having some argument with client and it was escalating. I "solved" some DB problem for them by walking over and asking a couple of questions. The clients went from screaming at the others to looking fairly pleased. But since I had no idea what was happening, I was stressed out. Unfortunately for me, the other folks at our company told me that they like being able to use me as a totem and drag me around to calm down folks.

Another power of mine is "Consultant hands", but I think most IT staff have that as well. That was what we called it when the helpdesk folks do the exact same thing the customer does, but it works. All due to consultant hands.
 
A conversation I had today:

THEM: Can you show me how to change my default browser.

ME: End users, right? Sure!

THEM: I'm IT, but I'm not *that much* in IT!

ME: How?
 
BowlOfRed said:
Another power of mine is "Consultant hands", but I think most IT staff have that as well. That was what we called it when the helpdesk folks do the exact same thing the customer does, but it works. All due to consultant hands.
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Been in that game for 20 years. You don't even need Consultant Hands, you just need to be nearby. I learned that if you sit beside them and ask them to repeat the actions that "went wrong" but to do it slowly so you can "take notes", it will work then as well. Who hasn't heard the phrase "Well, it didn't work last time I tried it!" (Inevitably PIBKAC :))
 
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theprestige said:
A conversation I had today:

THEM: Can you show me how to change my default browser.

ME: End users, right? Sure!

THEM: I'm IT, but I'm not *that much* in IT!

ME: How?
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Especially since if you open your non-default browser, a little message generally pops up saying "This is not your default browser. Would you like to make it your default browser?"
 
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