On Jun 13, 2009, at 11:35 PM, Lamont Granquist wrote: > most operational teams define their metrics in > terms of things like closing tickets quickly and as a result they > tend to > not fix underlying problems (a difficult and time consuming thing to > do, > but which pays off much better than simply closing the same tickets > over > and over again every month/week/day/hour ad infinitum).
The key problem here is *compensation*. It's amazing what happens when people are paid to -- actually understand the problem, -- solve the problem, -- explain the solution, and -- prevent the problem from occurring again. OTOH, if people are paid to make problems go away, then every ticket looks like a stupid end-user problem that can be readily closed. The typical business model for technical support discourages in-depth quality support. Consider: Aren't most IT support shops and most vendor support contracts paid a fixed yearly amount? For IT support shops, each additional hour spent working on a user's problem is an hour less he can spend on his own hobby tasks. As soon as he resolves this problem, he can go back to studying for the CCNP exam or organizing his video collection. For equipment/software vendors, each additional hour working on a customer's problem means less profit. Experts should bill for their time as it's used. For in-house IT department, this might mean inter-departmental billing. Some IT managers, when they're honest, are just afraid of any kind of accountability. But the need to get over it. Vendors can bill hourly, and adopt retainer-like structures. For example, suppose a product costs $N and yearly support is 0.15*N. The monthly retainer can be 1/12*0.15*N. It makes a HUGE difference on morale when you know the customer appreciates your work enough to actually pay for it. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
