I tried my best with a humor-based tech comic strip. I must admit, though, I can’t cut it. I’m a sponge for tech news and information, but, I’m not funny. Not on paper anyway. So, The Othernauts, will not be a humor based comic strip. Instead, (and I plan to keep the name) It will become a graphic novel. It’s based on an idea I’ve had in mind for a story/comic/book/movie for the past 15 years. It’s a massive undertaking. But rest assured, I have help! Keep tabs on its progress at http://www.othernauts.com
Daniel Raeder
Professional Website of Daniel Raeder
The Othernauts – Update
June 1st, 2010
The Othernauts – Devices in Between
April 12th, 2010
The Othernauts – The Black Hole
April 11th, 2010Othernauts has moved! Please visit http://othernauts.com/the-black-hole/
Copyright 2010 - Daniel Raeder
The Othernauts – iPhone OS 4 (Comic Strip)
April 11th, 2010Othernauts has moved! Please visit: http://othernauts.com/the-othernauts-iphone-os-4-preview-in-space/
Copyright 2010 - Daniel Raeder
Understanding Policy, Process and Procedure
February 17th, 2010At a time when reallocation of support resources and restructuring is essential for both economic reasons and for reasons to support the mission of a company, providing support center employees the tools to quickly acquire new knowledge and adapt to foreign job duties is critical.
Technical training provides the necessary tools to provide technical support. But how does an employee with no prior experience in the operations of an area or department handle the day-to-day questions of where to go for information about their tasks, why it is necessary, and how they can accomplish them without taxing other resources?
Acquisitions bring new talent into the mix. Over-taxed departments bring underutilized talent to their aide. But if the new talent is moved into an area that has not documented how it operates, the learning curve for the new talent is tremendous.
Their learning curve translates to a draw on already over-taxed team members as they seek answers to questions that are generally known by the veterans of the team. Something as simple as replacing a piece of defective hardware can become several hours of work for both the new talent and the veteran, for example. The new talent searches endlessly for the information and finally resolves to seek direction from someone who might know. The veteran explains the procedure, but that can often lead to confusion and more questions, especially when the procedure varies from one veteran to another. This shoulder-tapping translates to lowered performance of the whole team while the newly acquired talent “ramps-up”.
Lowered performance or less efficient service is not the only symptom. As team members are added, so are new personalities, traits and gifts. Each new person brings a new element to the team which on the positive side, makes the team dynamic and responsive. Yet, on the negative side, when these newly-adds are presented with conflicting operational instructions from various veterans, they will ultimately blend the conflicting information into “their own way”. The team is then comprised of many talented individuals who achieve results, but they are not repeatable results, they are not scalable and they are not consistent from member to member. This is fine when there are no expectations from customers. But customers desire a predictable, positive experience from their support provider.
The following outlines a general industry agreed-upon definition set of Policy, Process, Procedure and a couple extras.
Continue Reading…
The Original Help Desk
February 16th, 2010This is a great video (Dutch with English Subtitles) that shows some of the pains of support for both the users and the support professionals who work with them.
Knowledge Work: Smarter Not Harder?
February 2nd, 2010More. Better. Faster.
IT Service Management as a practice takes into account every aspect of IT service delivery, from design, cost and deployment to projects, changes, releases and support. It provides a framework to establish measurable and repeatable objectives within an organization for the management of information and technology. Yet, its adoption by most organizations has been slow, if at all.
Implementing best practices is expensive and confusing to most organizations. And not having them implemented to begin with means there are already too many fires to put out, much to react to, and too little time for much else. There is also a perception that introducing a standard framework or processes in an environment that is built on reaction would stifle responsiveness with bureaucratic red tape.
Most IT shops operate with a culture of busy-ness. It is not that the work itself is busywork, necessarily. It is that the workload is so dramatically overwhelming, ideas like planning, designing and implementing IT Service Management best practices are the least immediate concerns on anyone’s mind. They have to fix the server that broke after the upgrade the night before, after not accounting for its impact on another system that depended on it. They need to respond to the service delivery complaint that has been escalated to senior management, which was caused by a lack of process guiding how to interact with a user, classify, document or resolve a service issue.
Even if best practices were designed and adopted, there would be resistance. Change means altering behaviors, attitudes and perceptions, and soliciting and securing a consensus. It also means reorganization of tasks, roles and duties. A tough sell for a culture used to doing what they do they way they do it; and generally doing a pretty good job at that.
These organizations tend to focus (and rightly so) very much on cost, productivity and worker utilization. How many widgets were produced? How much did they cost to produce? How much time did the widget producer spend producing them? These are valid questions for a manufacturer. But are these questions valid for IT workers, or more specifically, IT support center professionals?
In most support centers, productivity is measured by the number of tickets opened and closed, how long resolution took, the speed of answering the phone or emails, and the amount of time spent doing all of these to determine utilization and therefore cost. But does this make sense to do? Continue Reading…
The Helpless Desk: A Brief History
February 1st, 2010
A 2006 survey conducted by online training provider, Skill Soft, rated Information Technology as the number one most stressful profession. In 2009 another survey concluded the same.
The reasons for this are manifold: uneducated and under trained users; high business demands for up-time and speedy problem resolution; lack of effective change control; lax IT security and IT management policies; a general misunderstanding of the information technology profession on the whole; and overworked, under compensated IT workers.
With IT workers’ stress levels at these heights, their attitudes turn ever more negative and cynical. Their ability to communicate positively with the user base they support becomes hampered. Complaints begin to rise, and perception of the support center becomes a compound nightmare which feeds on itself, creating further misunderstanding, lack of trust in the support team, and further increases in IT workers’ stress levels. This phenomenon results in high employee turnover in the support team, which only adds to the ever decreasing morale and cynicism, and fuels the cycle exponentially.
It is no wonder support centers often will eventually become deplored and misunderstood by its customers and executives, a condition that ultimately renders it almost completely ineffective. The support center members become a support group, the help desk becomes the helpless desk, gurus become grunts. Talented employees start quitting. Perception dwindles further while surveys score lower and lower. And the salaries of the support team get smaller and smaller as executives judge the support team as a necessary evil — simply a cost that they must bear, but one that should be marginalized wherever possible and written off.
Most support centers suffer from this cycle. In a boom-and-bust economy, support teams are common places for business owners to examine costs and one of the first places they look to cut when the business cycle takes a downward turn. Often, they do this at the risk of their company’s overall productivity and profitability. Yet the trend persists, and has persisted for more than three decades.
How did this come to be? Continue Reading…
Dilbert
January 26th, 2010