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

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In the past our email system has sometimes had temporary problems that would block external emails. Employees could email each other, but customer emails would vanish into the ether.
I emailed the IT help desk with a quick FYI because a customer in Canada emailed me twice this morning, once at 10:25 and again at 11:24. The 11:24 email arrived at 11:42, and the 10:25 email arrived at 12:00. I wanted to make sure they were aware if there was a problem.

I was told that traffic is backed up at the border today. :)
 
Reminds me of a lady at my company who used to send out tons of emails to tons of people, all on subjects they didn't care about. It was work-related to her work, but not really needed by the people she was continually blasting emails to. Eventually she switched to a different position in the company and ran into a curious problem when it came to communicating actually relevant work-related information: it turns out that dozens of people had set up an Outlook rule to immediately route any email from her into the trash.
 
That's another common trait of the "Don't actually have a job" types I mentioned earlier. They absolutely love to forward other people's e-mails to the same people who already got it with an (at most) one line addition of "Let me reiterate what so and so said about blah blah blah" or something to that effect.
 
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JoeMorgue said:
That's another common trait of the "Don't actually have a job" types I mentioned earlier. They absolutely love to forward other people's e-mails to the same people who already got it with an (at most) one line addition of "Let me reiterate what so and so blah blah blah" or something to that effect.
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I once had a kind of senior manager without portfolio in my hierarchy who'd be copied in on mails sent to managers and forward them to the same manager five minutes later with a comment saying 'I think we need to act on this.'

One of the few good things about SOX was that he got canned when it became clear that he didn't add any value to any business processes.
 
This morning's fun: explaining, and then demonstrating with examples, why dividing a given set of data up into subcategories to get averages then averaging the averages of those subcategories together yields different results from getting the averages across the larger categories to begin with. It's a math thing, I don't have control over how math works. And the person I'm explaining this to is a director in the finance department...
 
I used to go through this with accountants all the time. For some reason they just didn't seem to understand that if you round off the amounts in your financial reports (to the dollar, to the nearest $1000, whatever) then the total of all your sub-reports may differ from the total of the main report by as much as 1 (dollar, $1000, whatever). As you say, it's out of my control how rounding works.
 
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TragicMonkey said:
This morning's fun: explaining, and then demonstrating with examples, why dividing a given set of data up into subcategories to get averages then averaging the averages of those subcategories together yields different results from getting the averages across the larger categories to begin with. It's a math thing, I don't have control over how math works. And the person I'm explaining this to is a director in the finance department...
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Just give him the data in a giant spreadsheet and leave it to him to get the standard deviations of the mean average modes or whatever. Just make sure you call the spreadsheet Jims_own_private_database_of_stuff.xlsx
 
We have a weekly IT newsletter. One of the features is the "new starters," and we're growing rapidly so there's a lot of them. The format is a photo of the colleague, their name and where they'll be working. Except there's rarely any photos, just the silhouettes from the template. The result is a webpage that's not very informative and looks terrible. Week after week. No one has time to fix it, I guess. Indicative
 
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Filippo Lippi said:
We have a weekly IT newsletter. One of the features is the "new starters," and we're growing rapidly so there's a lot of them. The format is a photo of the colleague, their name and where they'll be working. Except there's rarely any photos, just the silhouettes from the template. The result is a webpage that's not very informative and looks terrible. Week after week. No one has time to fix it, I guess. Indicative
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Were any of the new hirees web jockeys?
 
Filippo Lippi said:
I think it's just that internal comms is very low priority
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I've noted in many companies that people have an idea like an internal website page as you describe, it will initially get some resources and made live but no provision is made for ongoing resources to keep them up to date or even relevant.
 
<triggered> Some 15 years back BigBankUK decided it needed an internal website. Naturally they hired consultants who decided the ideal metaphor for an internal website was "The High Street". So you'd have Library (for knowledge), Bank (for anything financial) etc. This was obviously brilliant stuff and acclaimed widely until some smartarse asked a stupid question like "How the **** is that supposed to work?" producing unnecessary embarassment for many talented and eager people.
There's always one.
 
You know, I think "library" would be a much more user-focused term than "knowledge base". I bet something like 80% of my callers have no idea that our publicly-searchable knowledge base exists.
 
A knowledge library project at one of my tech support workplaces was highly unpopular at first. The doctrine was, to reduce time troubleshooting, for any ticket with a known issue you would search up the solution, apply it to the ticket, perform the steps as noted, and then manually document further only if the results deviated from expectations, otherwise affirming the resolution. If the documented solution was not best practice, before taking the next call the tech was to submit an update, which would be cleaned up by the technical writing team, and then be submitted to a tech lead for approval.

If the solution was not already in the knowledge base, and it wasn't a one-off situation, the tech was to submit the steps they took, in order to make it a new solution. The same cleanup and approval applied.

It wasn't well liked, making a lot of the reps feel like script monkeys, when in fact we were able to troubleshoot up to what's considered level 2 solutions. (Level 3 was at the sysadmin/developer tier). However, after a while it proved quite valuable. The solutions started to be a good match to what steps we usually used, saving documentation time. In particular one frequent process that I recall used to spell a 20-minute call or longer was improved to be a reliable first call resolve in about 12 minutes. Quite a bit of expertise was shared and solution processes improved.

Then we all got outsourced. Doh!
 
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I've said previously that every single job tracking system I have used has had an integrated knowledge management functionality that was unused in favour of an external knowledge base.
 
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