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

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JoeMorgue said:
Again I'm just so overjoyedly happy for all you IT folks who have the option of telling your users how to do things.

Meanwhile most of us have to just magically figure out a way to transfer data from an 8 track cassette to a cuneiform tablet over fax if that's how our users want to do it.
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My favorites are the Special Applications, those that are not very good at all but must be maintained at all costs because they are the personal favorite of somebody important. "I know this thing was written in 1990 and full of holes and doesn't work without manually editing the server's registry every four hours, but it's Doctor Trevolatunt's favorite application for storing data on bitemark injuries! It must be maintained! We've cut all cost of living increases for the year for all staff to budget an extra six million towards this."

Even better when it's not a niche program but one that you're forced to integrate into enterprise-wide systems despite it being a piece of crap. My company rolled out then supported a truly dreadful accounting software because it was the pet of this lady who'd been a bigwig in IT for 40 years. Then the day after she retired we started replacing it with something that actually worked. She probably cost the company half a billion bucks in the six or seven years her pet monster chewed up all our other applications and crapped the floor.

And of course there's always the applications that executives get sold on because they make pretty charts. "We NEED this!!!!" somebody in a suit exclaims, all excited, emerging from the sales rep's demo. (I sometimes wonder if the sales reps realize they could make a fortune by guiding these eager execs to attend timeshare vacation condo pitches in exchange for a small cut.) "It's a pie chart, Ed," we tell them, "we have those now. Excel does better ones, and we don't have to buy anything new." "But look at the COLORS! And there's effects! We need this to synergize our agility in business! Downsize whoever you have to, we need this program immediately! It's transformational!!!"

Sometimes I have to remind myself I get paid the same amount whether anythings works or not, the only difference to me is the frequency and volume of people yelling.
 
The whole "Data is magically different if you display it like this" thing is probably the biggest, or at least one of the biggest, time sink causing mythologies in the business world.

I also think being picky about how data is presented to you is like the first skill useless people develop.
 
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Me: "Hey Tier above me. Can I get help with problem X?"

Tier Above Me: "Sure thing. WOW here's the problem. Your procedures for how you do this are insane! This isn't how it's done in the 'Official ISO 420.69 How You Should Do This' manual. My recommended solution is a full top down rebuild of your entire process."

Me: "......"
 
JoeMorgue said:
Me: "Hey Tier above me. Can I get help with problem X?"

Tier Above Me: "Sure thing. WOW here's the problem. Your procedures for how you do this are insane! This isn't how it's done in the 'Official ISO 420.69 How You Should Do This' manual. My recommended solution is a full top down rebuild of your entire process."

Me: "......"
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"Okay, I'm going to put the ticket in your name and notify the customer you're doing the full top down rebuild thing. Thanks bye!" *click*
 
TragicMonkey said:
My favorites are the Special Applications, those that are not very good at all but must be maintained at all costs because they are the personal favorite of somebody important. "I know this thing was written in 1990 and full of holes and doesn't work without manually editing the server's registry every four hours, but it's Doctor Trevolatunt's favorite application for storing data on bitemark injuries! It must be maintained! We've cut all cost of living increases for the year for all staff to budget an extra six million towards this."



Even better when it's not a niche program but one that you're forced to integrate into enterprise-wide systems despite it being a piece of crap. My company rolled out then supported a truly dreadful accounting software because it was the pet of this lady who'd been a bigwig in IT for 40 years. Then the day after she retired we started replacing it with something that actually worked. She probably cost the company half a billion bucks in the six or seven years her pet monster chewed up all our other applications and crapped the floor.



And of course there's always the applications that executives get sold on because they make pretty charts. "We NEED this!!!!" somebody in a suit exclaims, all excited, emerging from the sales rep's demo. (I sometimes wonder if the sales reps realize they could make a fortune by guiding these eager execs to attend timeshare vacation condo pitches in exchange for a small cut.) "It's a pie chart, Ed," we tell them, "we have those now. Excel does better ones, and we don't have to buy anything new." "But look at the COLORS! And there's effects! We need this to synergize our agility in business! Downsize whoever you have to, we need this program immediately! It's transformational!!!"



Sometimes I have to remind myself I get paid the same amount whether anythings works or not, the only difference to me is the frequency and volume of people yelling.
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Or the crappy software sold by the CEO's side hustle.

Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk
 
Elvis666 said:
Or the crappy software sold by the CEO's Chief Surgeon's side hustle.
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They (think they) are god. Therefore they get what they want.

Well... They may be gods of medicine. But they are rarely gods of IT. We install and finally get running the Aztec temple of crap they have paid millions for to an Eastern European fly-by-night bot-farm. Then the GoM transfers to either Mayo Clinic or Johns Hopkins (or Tierra Del Fuego or somesuch), and the need for the million-dollar monstrosity disappears. And we are stuck with both the price-tag and the useless kit we cannot redeploy to do something useful.

Boat-anchors, anyone??
 
Rant incoming.

Okay, so I'm getting real anxiety about this Genesys thing, above and beyond the normal background anxiety over new things that I always have. I was literally lying awake at 4am this morning with all the Bad Things cycling on repeat through my brain.

tl;dr: it's a bad tool and not well suited to our purposes.

First, and I apologise for the stereotyping here, it's so American. By that I mean that its overall design philosophy is to squeeze as much productivity out of the peons as possible with little regard to their quality of life, because when they burn out you can just fire them and hire some more. I could have misinterpreted this, but in the reporting tools I got a tutorial on the other day, I was pretty sure I saw a parameter that indicated the amount of money lost due to an employee's break time. It's like something that a company run by Jeff Bezos would use.

Second, it's bloated with features that we will never use because we are not in the business of telemarketing. It isn't a Service Desk tool, it's a telemarketing tool. It's set up to make cold calls. We're shoehorning it into providing service desk functions, but it's quite clear that this is not its primary design function.

Here's a specific example of the kind of thing I'm concerned about. We currently have a tool called our Wallboard, which monitors our queues in real time. It shows us how many calls are waiting in each queue, how long they've been waiting, and a few other statistics like our abandonment rate which are important for daily reporting but not significant for the general work of an agent. It's a simple table with the queues in rows and the individual stats in columns. On the same screen we see a list of the agents who are logged on, what their status is, and how long they have been in that status. It's a useful tool that just sits in the background showing us some stuff that we need to know, and something like it exists in pretty much every Service Desk environment I've ever been a part of.

I've seen the monstrosity that the Genesys developers have tried to cobble together to show us the same information. It is a nightmare. Instead of a simple table, each queue has a separate widget that crams as many parameters as possible into tiny squares, which are then tiled across the screen. It is ghastly and not at all useful at a glance like the old Wallboard is. Granted, it was still in development at the time I saw it, but from what the presenter was saying, it seemed like this was something that they had to cobble together because nobody had ever thought of it before and it was therefore not a part of the design of the product, despite it being a pretty standard tool for call centres.

I'd like to find the person who decided that this was the system that we would be migrating to, and deliver to them a swift kick up the bum. As Zathras said, this is wrong tool.

And it goes live the day after tomorrow.
 
Elvis666 said:
Or the crappy software sold by the CEO's side hustle.
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When I worked for a much smaller company all the "executives" had side hustles selling Tupperware, candles, quilted handbags, and "party snack foods" like powders you mix with sour cream to make dip. It was weird as hell, they threw "parties" to sell this crap and each of them invited everyone else so to keep relations good they all bought from each other in an endless circulation of crap. Luckily for me I was never invited to any of those things because they assumed that being male I had no use for that kind of nonsense, and by god they were right. I did receive a stupid candle as a "corporate Xmas present" because the head of accounting sold candles and realized she was also in charge of getting the corporate Xmas presents...her boss was super pissed off because she hadn't thought of it first.
 
arthwollipot said:
Rant incoming.

Okay, so I'm getting real anxiety about this Genesys thing, above and beyond the normal background anxiety over new things that I always have. I was literally lying awake at 4am this morning with all the Bad Things cycling on repeat through my brain.

tl;dr: it's a bad tool and not well suited to our purposes.

First, and I apologise for the stereotyping here, it's so American. By that I mean that its overall design philosophy is to squeeze as much productivity out of the peons as possible with little regard to their quality of life, because when they burn out you can just fire them and hire some more. I could have misinterpreted this, but in the reporting tools I got a tutorial on the other day, I was pretty sure I saw a parameter that indicated the amount of money lost due to an employee's break time. It's like something that a company run by Jeff Bezos would use.

Second, it's bloated with features that we will never use because we are not in the business of telemarketing. It isn't a Service Desk tool, it's a telemarketing tool. It's set up to make cold calls. We're shoehorning it into providing service desk functions, but it's quite clear that this is not its primary design function.

Here's a specific example of the kind of thing I'm concerned about. We currently have a tool called our Wallboard, which monitors our queues in real time. It shows us how many calls are waiting in each queue, how long they've been waiting, and a few other statistics like our abandonment rate which are important for daily reporting but not significant for the general work of an agent. It's a simple table with the queues in rows and the individual stats in columns. On the same screen we see a list of the agents who are logged on, what their status is, and how long they have been in that status. It's a useful tool that just sits in the background showing us some stuff that we need to know, and something like it exists in pretty much every Service Desk environment I've ever been a part of.

I've seen the monstrosity that the Genesys developers have tried to cobble together to show us the same information. It is a nightmare. Instead of a simple table, each queue has a separate widget that crams as many parameters as possible into tiny squares, which are then tiled across the screen. It is ghastly and not at all useful at a glance like the old Wallboard is. Granted, it was still in development at the time I saw it, but from what the presenter was saying, it seemed like this was something that they had to cobble together because nobody had ever thought of it before and it was therefore not a part of the design of the product, despite it being a pretty standard tool for call centres.

I'd like to find the person who decided that this was the system that we would be migrating to, and deliver to them a swift kick up the bum. As Zathras said, this is wrong tool.

And it goes live the day after tomorrow.
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As I have said a few times here, about the only answer sometimes is to let it fail. Let the complaints flood in, and direct them to the new application support team/person/scapegoat. Lather, rinse, repeat until either they fix it, or it is removed and your perfectly fine old system gets restored. I'm betting they will "push through", to the dismay of your user base.
 
Norman Alexander said:
As I have said a few times here, about the only answer sometimes is to let it fail. Let the complaints flood in, and direct them to the new application support team/person/scapegoat. Lather, rinse, repeat until either they fix it, or it is removed and your perfectly fine old system gets restored. I'm betting they will "push through", to the dismay of your user base.
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See that's the thing. It's not going to affect the user base. It will be invisible to them. At worst, it will affect their wait times, and history demonstrates that they're quite content to put the call on speaker and wait for 40 minutes for their call to be answered if necessary.

No, this one's going to be pain for us, and for us alone.
 
arthwollipot said:
See that's the thing. It's not going to affect the user base. It will be invisible to them. At worst, it will affect their wait times, and history demonstrates that they're quite content to put the call on speaker and wait for 40 minutes for their call to be answered if necessary.

No, this one's going to be pain for us, and for us alone.
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When their call wait times start getting past 60 minutes every time, they will notice. ;)
 
Another day, another dollar. Just remember: you get paid to be there, not to actually fix things. Sure, it's nice if you can fix things. But if you can't, what are they going to do? Fire you and replace you with someone else who can't fix it, either? That would cost them more money than just keeping you on. Just do the best you can, and eventually all problems resolve themselves. Because people are mortal, and eventually even the most demanding user succumbs to the inexorability of the grave. If you listen very carefully when on the phone with the users, you can almost hear them already beginning to decay! #Positivity #Cheerfulness #JCPenneySale #TooBlessedToStress #TupacLives
 
Me, 6 months ago during a building expansion. "How many workstations are you going to want in this area?"
Manager: "4. No need to pay for anymore than that."
Me: "4? Are you sure? That's sounds low."
Manager: "4."
Me: "Okay 4. You're paying for 4 data drops."

So anyway long story short this morning was me setting up the 8th workstation in this area.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Me, 6 months ago during a building expansion. "How many workstations are you going to want in this area?"
Manager: "4. No need to pay for anymore than that."
Me: "4? Are you sure? That's sounds low."
Manager: "4."
Me: "Okay 4. You're paying for 4 data drops."

So anyway long story short this morning was me setting up the 8th workstation in this area.
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Which is 4 + 4 - so what are you complaining about.... That you didn't have the foresight to ask how many 4s they would want can hardly be their fault!


;)
 
TragicMonkey said:
Another day, another dollar. Just remember: you get paid to be there, not to actually fix things. Sure, it's nice if you can fix things. But if you can't, what are they going to do? Fire you and replace you with someone else who can't fix it, either? That would cost them more money than just keeping you on. Just do the best you can, and eventually all problems resolve themselves. Because people are mortal, and eventually even the most demanding user succumbs to the inexorability of the grave. If you listen very carefully when on the phone with the users, you can almost hear them already beginning to decay! #Positivity #Cheerfulness #JCPenneySale #TooBlessedToStress #TupacLives
Click to expand...


Sun Sever Su:

If you sit by the network router long enough, you will see your enemy logoff.
 
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