Dear Users... (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people)

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Wudang said:
A senior manager at IBM UK used to refer to "PhD users". If he trusted you, he explained it meant "Press Here, Dummy".
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Some senior managers are PhD's themselves.

One manager at the company my wife used to work for was constantly complaining that the data the HR dept sent through each month was "rubbish". This went of for months.

One day he stormed into their office and said "I am going to get some external consultants to sort out your data problem for once and for all".

They opened up the Excel spreadsheet and he said, "Look I will show you" and then highlighted a column of figures and sorted it.

They said "You do realise, that only sorts one column, don't you?"
 
Or the very senior manager at a certain bank who would look out the window of his chauffeured car as he drove past one branch each morning and if he could see the ATM was out of service he'd get someone to ring the head of IT to tell them the "network was down". This branch was at a premium site for foot traffic for bars and restaurants and so a lot of people drawing money, especially at weekends. So staff started stuffing the machine with as many high denomination notes as would fit each Friday evening. To hell with the customers who just needed enough cash for the bus home.
 
Or, I used to work for a major bank and part of my job involved making sure if we had a problem like a server crashing ops could see it was a server for service X and it was 1 of 8 backup servers. Our servers just in Europe were in the 10s of thousands so we needed that kind of triage.

So we had this tool that showed services something like a spiderweb (technically a directed acyclic graph) with the service (say internet banking) as the hub and all the servers, databases etc at the ends. If we had a problem you'd see a yellow or red line from the node towards the hub. Alerts would reinforce each other, so if two DB servers in the same cluster had a problem it would be marked as more serious. Very sensitive to make sure we caught every problem. Most people would see the subtree of a given service but we also has a total overview for heads of ops etc. It was a tool for ops and service support teams to give context to alerts.

Our senior manager didn't tell us he'd launched his own project to include this in a new management dashboard for the regional CIOs, COOs and boardroom for which he'd take all the credit. The first we heard was when the owner of a very visible service for very very rich people was pissing his pants because his service was "down". All the people looking at this saw was that it was "down" not that 2 backup servers, 1 out of 4 sql servers in a cluster and a couple of other things had the kind of BAU issues you expect of busy servers. RAM at 80% use, disk space below low warning threshhold. Most of these wouldn't even go to ops, just automatically generate a ticket to go the appropriate team.

I had a chat with ops management and built a "context sensitive view for management oversight" (IIRC). I calculated once that if you nuked 3 out of 4 of our biggest datacenters you might just get a "service affected" warning. In the meantime, my team, ops, service management, the support teams in the various services and so on spent many thousands of man hours trying to explain to panicked business managers that their services were just fine.
 
User: Please create a custom report that emails us this information daily.
Me: No. (Internally - not just no but HELL no).
Also Me: That information is available to you by logging in here.
User: We don't want to have to log in anywhere, we want it emailed to us, daily.
Me: No.
User: ...
Me: NO, I'm not creating a custom script that I have to maintain and support from here to eternity when the person who writes that script will move positions and the person who wants that script will move and then nobody will know why we even have it but they'll scream when it breaks and make my team scramble to fix it just because you are too lazy to log into the tool that provides you that information.
User: <pout>
 
Faydra said:
User: Please create a custom report that emails us this information daily.
Me: No. (Internally - not just no but HELL no).
Also Me: That information is available to you by logging in here.
User: We don't want to have to log in anywhere, we want it emailed to us, daily.
Me: No.
User: ...
Me: NO, I'm not creating a custom script that I have to maintain and support from here to eternity when the person who writes that script will move positions and the person who wants that script will move and then nobody will know why we even have it but they'll scream when it breaks and make my team scramble to fix it just because you are too lazy to log into the tool that provides you that information.
User: <pout>
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Write the script and discontinue it in three months. See how it takes for them to notice. ;)
 
Blue Mountain said:
Write the script and discontinue it in three months. See how it takes for them to notice. ;)
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Method (1) Write the script such that it takes them to the login prompt with more detailed instructions on what buttons to push to get their report out...after they log in.

Method (2) Tell them they can have the report emailed daily, but for security and resource efficiency purposes they will need to login daily and push the "Email Report" button.
 
Minor nuisance, our HR people (who are super busy) use old Word docs to do mail merges.
They want the OLE DB to work the way it used to and I help them with the MERGEFIELD format codes.

My director told them two years ago they need to create new Word docx, being uber busy and best friends with the Executive Director of HR they have not. So every year a little tweak here a little tweak there
 
alfaniner said:
Isn't that type of notification normal in a business environment? The better to maintain spam filters? I'm pretty sure that's how my old company wanted it.
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We ask for it only in situations where the spam is persistent, contains particularly offensive content, represents a threat to personal safety or a risk to our IT systems.

And that is outlined clearly in documentation on the corporate portal that everybody has access to. We also ask for the email as an attachment (in order to preserve the message header info), but people just forward them to us anyway.
 
Ooh man, emails suck. Here's one from today's stock.

We need to connect the network connection of the DTA – Network cable can be found plugged in to socket near printer between WS 104 and 105 on level 2...
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Um, what?

ETA: we've also got one here in our queue asking us what folder to save documents into.
 
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Co-Worker: "Service Now is crazy! I got 50 emails over 1 single incident!"
Me: "If only there were some place you could open a ticket about that".
 
Faydra said:
Co-Worker: "Service Now is crazy! I got 50 emails over 1 single incident!"
Me: "If only there were some place you could open a ticket about that".
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Or don't put yourself on a watch list then use the Live Feed to chat for an hour (adding notes to the incident each time) :)

TBH, that sounds like a bad workflow or a process issue.
 
arthwollipot said:
Ooh man, emails suck. Here's one from today's stock.

... confusing email content ...

Um, what?
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Reply: Use the network widget to cromulate your participle.

Then they will call in to ask you what the heck YOU meant. And then you can get to the meat of the problem directly.

ETA: we've also got one here in our queue asking us what folder to save documents into.
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Obviously, the one shaped like a wire basket. That's "American" for "all-purpose filing system".
 
ServiceNow, like most ticketing systems, is full of useful features to streamline workflow.

Unfortunately, like most ticketing systems, the first thing the customer always does is customize it to the point where it's completely unusable by anyone sane.
 
theprestige said:
ServiceNow, like most ticketing systems, is full of useful features to streamline workflow.

Unfortunately, like most ticketing systems, the first thing the customer always does is customize it to the point where it's completely unusable by anyone sane.
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I work in a hospital IT section. We are insane by any standard already. ServiceNow is our perfect tool! ;)
 
Service Now is horrendous at best but at least we stopped using release packages.

The Snow Release Package is the 7th level of hell.
 
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