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

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KPIs are wonderful things if your job is to supply the data for their measurement and not do the actual things being measured. It makes you necessary enough to be indispensable but unimportant enough to evade all the power struggles.
 
One of the reasons I like my job is that we have achieved the balance between maintaining KPIs and actual customer service. It's hard for an organisation to do, but by and large we've done it.
 
I am reminded of the time that we (I'd left by the time the axe fell) were out sourced and they changed the SLA for fixing P1's from 1 hour to 6 hours and then trumpeted that the KPI was being met more often. That was <large parcel delivery firm recently taken over by Americans>
 
If you're like me and things being intentionally inefficient for no reason is rather rage inducing, here's a hand metric for how crappy your job is.

How many ways can you be stopped in the middle of what you are doing?

I've given up trying to maintain any "system" for accepting troublecalls so I've basically just been beat down to the point that I accept them all. Our actual trouble ticking systems, e-mails directly to me, texts from unknown numbers, people walking up directly to more, sure whatever I they've won I don't care anymore. If a Carrier Pigeon shoves telegraph message under my door that is written the Zodiac Cypher that's really just the words NEED HELP!!! with no information or contact, I'm right on it.

The problem is this makes it impossible to prioritize anything. I'm in the absolute worst possible place for a guy who's mind works like mine does, constantly starting and stopping, jumping in and out of, bouncing around problems never able to actually focus on one for more then a few literal moments.

Add to this a user base who act like they can't see I'm already working on something and will literally walk to me and data dump their issue on me one long stream of consciousness and then walk away.

The only feedback I get from my uppers is to "Just explain to them you're working on something right now and will get to them as soon as you can" but that takes as long or longer than fixing some of their issues. The "Trained Helplessness" of my user base has reached max saturation at this point.

I'm glad I've got a vacation coming up.
 
JoeMorgue said:
If you're like me and things being intentionally inefficient for no reason is rather rage inducing, here's a hand metric for how crappy your job is.

How many ways can you be stopped in the middle of what you are doing?

I've given up trying to maintain any "system" for accepting troublecalls so I've basically just been beat down to the point that I accept them all. Our actual trouble ticking systems, e-mails directly to me, texts from unknown numbers, people walking up directly to more, sure whatever I they've won I don't care anymore. If a Carrier Pigeon shoves telegraph message under my door that is written the Zodiac Cypher that's really just the words NEED HELP!!! with no information or contact, I'm right on it.

The problem is this makes it impossible to prioritize anything. I'm in the absolute worst possible place for a guy who's mind works like mine does, constantly starting and stopping, jumping in and out of, bouncing around problems never able to actually focus on one for more then a few literal moments.

Add to this a user base who act like they can't see I'm already working on something and will literally walk to me and data dump their issue on me one long stream of consciousness and then walk away.

The only feedback I get from my uppers is to "Just explain to them you're working on something right now and will get to them as soon as you can" but that takes as long or longer than fixing some of their issues. The "Trained Helplessness" of my user base has reached max saturation at this point.

I'm glad I've got a vacation coming up.
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For me, I'd adopt a policy of "What's your ticket number?" If they don't have one, they don't get service. A week or so of that should cut down on the interruptions.
 
JoeMorgue said:
If you're like me and things being intentionally inefficient for no reason is rather rage inducing, here's a hand metric for how crappy your job is.

How many ways can you be stopped in the middle of what you are doing?
Click to expand...

I gave up trying to explain to the guys in charge of room planning that the one little study in an advertising company that loved open plan is destroyed by the years of research from Lister and DeMarco that programmer productivity's biggest impacting factor is a quiet workplace to focus. link. I've told endless people to read their book : Peopleware.
One team of 4 developers I was in, we all ending up spending most of the day WFH when it wasn't officially allowed as managers in our open plan area wouldn't address 2 people who had no concept of other people's focus. One had meltdowns like a toddler.
 
Wudang said:
I gave up trying to explain to the guys in charge of room planning that the one little study in an advertising company that loved open plan is destroyed by the years of research from Lister and DeMarco that programmer productivity's biggest impacting factor is a quiet workplace to focus. link. I've told endless people to read their book : Peopleware.
One team of 4 developers I was in, we all ending up spending most of the day WFH when it wasn't officially allowed as managers in our open plan area wouldn't address 2 people who had no concept of other people's focus. One had meltdowns like a toddler.
Click to expand...

In my prior position the entire division doing build was kept in an open floor plan. Three floors, thirty-something teams of ten people, all open. So we could "collaborate". We even had our desks up against the desks of other teams so we were face-to-face.

I figure it added at least one full year to the implementation.

Management, of course, had offices.

Eta: the only other place I worked that was that open was at an insurance company where everyone's job was to be on the phone all day. Hundreds of conversations a day, hundreds of people, all open, all at once. And they played music over the PA nonstop all day, too, because a study about grocery store shoppers in 1958 said it was a good thing. The PA music did not sync up to the phone system hold music.
 
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Wudang said:
I gave up trying to explain to the guys in charge of room planning that the one little study in an advertising company that loved open plan is destroyed by the years of research from Lister and DeMarco that programmer productivity's biggest impacting factor is a quiet workplace to focus. link. I've told endless people to read their book : Peopleware.
One team of 4 developers I was in, we all ending up spending most of the day WFH when it wasn't officially allowed as managers in our open plan area wouldn't address 2 people who had no concept of other people's focus. One had meltdowns like a toddler.
Click to expand...

As a retired programmer, I wholeheartedly agree. To get something done, I need some quiet time, free from distractions. For me at least, it's also useful to be able to swear every now and then without worrying about disturbing my coworkers.
 
Seriously, how do you keep track of the important KPI that is WTF's per minute, if it can't be said?
 
CORed said:
As a retired programmer, I wholeheartedly agree. To get something done, I need some quiet time, free from distractions. For me at least, it's also useful to be able to swear every now and then without worrying about disturbing my coworkers.
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Yep, and a retired analyst I cannot agree more, except...

There are often situations where two people working together, uninterrupted, produce much more that two people working on their own.

Working from home really made this apparent, where I'd often be working with a developer 'in my head' (headphones) via a Teams call, or mobile phone call, and we'd plow through the technical challenges together, or where he just needed to bounce ideas off someone.

Over the last two years we made a huge amount of progress, cleaning up the steaming pile of cluster-fail that had resulted from previous efforts which had clearly been developed without any design.

We'll be leaving a set of micro services that return responses in microseconds, that are robust and fault-tolerant, with a clearly defined and explained structure and architecture.
(Not to mention rigorous security and understandable logging and error messages).

i.e. Instead of "Bork!" entire system crashes, we now have:

Error 'ID' Transaction 'ID' cannot be processed because input 'name' contains a mixture of letters and numbers. Input 'name' must be numeric only...

(and no other service is compromised by the bad data).

Oh well, I'm sure some new manager will come in and replace it with epic fail of the month.
 
novaphile said:
Yep, and a retired analyst I cannot agree more, except...

There are often situations where two people working together, uninterrupted, produce much more that two people working on their own.

Working from home really made this apparent, where I'd often be working with a developer 'in my head' (headphones) via a Teams call, or mobile phone call, and we'd plow through the technical challenges together, or where he just needed to bounce ideas off someone.

Over the last two years we made a huge amount of progress, cleaning up the steaming pile of cluster-fail that had resulted from previous efforts which had clearly been developed without any design.

We'll be leaving a set of micro services that return responses in microseconds, that are robust and fault-tolerant, with a clearly defined and explained structure and architecture.
(Not to mention rigorous security and understandable logging and error messages).

i.e. Instead of "Bork!" entire system crashes, we now have:

Error 'ID' Transaction 'ID' cannot be processed because input 'name' contains a mixture of letters and numbers. Input 'name' must be numeric only...

(and no other service is compromised by the bad data).

Oh well, I'm sure some new manager will come in and replace it with epic fail of the month.
Click to expand...

That looks like a classic case of you did your jobs so well nobody will notice it.
 
novaphile said:
Yep, and a retired analyst I cannot agree more, except...

There are often situations where two people working together, uninterrupted, produce much more that two people working on their own.

Working from home really made this apparent, where I'd often be working with a developer 'in my head' (headphones) via a Teams call, or mobile phone call, and we'd plow through the technical challenges together, or where he just needed to bounce ideas off someone.

Over the last two years we made a huge amount of progress, cleaning up the steaming pile of cluster-fail that had resulted from previous efforts which had clearly been developed without any design.

We'll be leaving a set of micro services that return responses in microseconds, that are robust and fault-tolerant, with a clearly defined and explained structure and architecture.
(Not to mention rigorous security and understandable logging and error messages).

i.e. Instead of "Bork!" entire system crashes, we now have:

Error 'ID' Transaction 'ID' cannot be processed because input 'name' contains a mixture of letters and numbers. Input 'name' must be numeric only...

(and no other service is compromised by the bad data).

Oh well, I'm sure some new manager will come in and replace it with epic fail of the month.
Click to expand...

rdaneel said:
That looks like a classic case of you did your jobs so well nobody will notice it.
Click to expand...

And the team would have been fired if they were employed at Twitter!
 
rdaneel said:
That looks like a classic case of you did your jobs so well nobody will notice it.
Click to expand...

Couple with what I've always called "Janet Jackson Syndrome" (re her early hit "What Have You Done For Me Lately?") where immediately after completing some massive piece of important work the people who requested it question your use and value to the company.

My personal best example of that was in the same conversation, which took ten minutes, my manager acknowledged the benefits of Thing A which I had just completed, then a remark or two later said she wished she didn't have any programmers on the team because they're not useful, then thirty seconds later asked me for Thing B which only a programmer could do.

It took me about eight months after that to find another position. She was demoted and moved elsewhere in the company after (but sadly not because of) that.
 
Sigh. Dear Coworker: when you accept a position that has been vacated eight times in the last three years, try to find out what your eight predecessors did that made them have to go. Then don't do that thing.
 
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