ABA Techshow Day 3 Session 1

Before I get started, I've got to say I had a good time meeting up with other bloggers last night. Kevin O'Keefe organized the event and picked up the tab, which was awesome. Got a chance to meet and chat with a few fellow bloggers, who I won't even try to link to, because I would undoubtedly leave someone out and I don't want to do that, but trust me when I say that I enjoyed meeting and chatting with all of you, and I'll be adding some new subscriptions to my Google Reader.

After spending some time there, I met up with Angela and walked up to Millennium Park, had dinner at Pizano's on Madison, and tried to take some interesting night time photos. We'll see how that worked out. :)

Just a couple of sessions this morning, then meeting back up with Angela for the St. Patrick's Day parade.

Session 1 Notes: Managing Email, Britt Lorish Knuttgen and Dan Pinnington

OHIO: Only Handle it Once
RAFT inbox: Refer/Read, Act, File, Toss
Flagging and/or folders as organizational tools. (We're already dealing with fallout of people filing things in folders and never deleting anything, we need to hit that concept hard before anything else!)

Are you doing work, or avoiding work by dealing with email? Turn off the new message "ding" and popup!

Speakers are suggesting using more than one email account, keeping various things out of your business email, like listserves, and personal email that you don't look at as often. (Since we block all outside email accounts, and web-based accounts, does it actually encourage people to use their work email address for everything? I think it does.) -Interesting live Twitter discussion about this idea, since I posted it there too, shows power of Twitter right there.

Lots of questions about problems with spam filters. Obviously, folks still have issues getting real email through spam filters. I am not surprised by that.

Uh-oh he's talking about Sent Items folder. As proud as I am of my clear inbox, I tend to keep a whole lot of Sent Items, too used to needing to CYA with emails I sent. ;)

One minute rule: decide what to do with a message within one minute, even if it's setting yourself a task to accomplish the more complicated task.

Use signature blocks like auto text. (I've been getting some good use out of this, learned it at the help desk, because we were getting many of the same questions through email, so we made the answers or common replies signature blocks. Now I use them for things like letting someone know when a Summation load is finished, for example)

I've never got the hang of search folders, why not actually use folders?

Britt is encouraging people to save client emails in the Doc or Practice management system so that it's attached to the client/matter instead of just sitting in someone's mailbox. YAY! I wonder if she'll come talk to some of our attorneys? :) (She demonstrated it with World Docs, didn't look much different than Worksite/Mailsite)

Labels: HelpDesk, LitigationSupport, Tech

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Free Tech Support

Phil Gerbyshak brought it to my attention, and I thought I'd certainly pass it along for those of you are running small businesses and might be looking for some remote support.

Friends,

Do you work from home and have the occasional annoying technical problem that you can't figure out, but you don't want to go in and pay the Geek Squad $50 or more an hour to do something you KNOW can't take more than 3 or 4 minutes?

Do you have a home PC that you're dying to set up with wireless, but your team of helpers consists of the 17 year old neighbor kid you know is setting up your network so he can surf the web without his parents knowing?

Do you need a little help getting your PC back on the automatic updates schedule it was a few months ago, but that you just haven't been able to make time for yet?

I've got a solution for you: MinuteFix. We can help you with any of your technical support issues on your computer, and we only charge you by the minute (hence the name, MinuteFix).

You might be a little concerned about how we're going to do this, what the caliber of our techs are, and if the support is really great. I know I would be asking those questions, and plenty more.

Instead of me telling you, I invite you to head over to MinuteFix and check us out. There's no cost until March 15th, so I'd bet you can get a few of your problems fixed, or at the least, you'd know that we are a great company and one you can count on to fix those annoying computer problems you've been having for years.

If you don't need this service for you, perhaps you know someone who does, and you could share MinuteFix with them.

If you're a blogger, I'd ask that you share this with all your readers, because many folks who only READ blogs aren't very technical, and could use some help. Or click below on the site and Stumble this so we can get the word out.

Free tech support until March 15th, 2008. Only from MinuteFix. Thanks!

I can't say I'm familiar with their work, but for free, it could be worth a shot for you to test them out. If you take advantage of the offer, be sure to come back and let us know how it worked out!

 

Labels: HelpDesk, Tech

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IT Workers at Home

I saw a conversation going around on Twitter this morning about working from home, and management's reluctance to allow their IT folks. I can't find any links for it now, but some of the ideas being tossed around were pretty interesting. Especially the idea that if your job can be done from outside the office, then it can be outsourced. In some sense that's true. I also saw mention of the fact that being in the same place as your internal customers helps in the interaction with them. I'd agree with that too.

When I think about our little IT Department, I think there are some things that could be done mostly from home, and some folks are allowed to work from home when necessary. That sort of thing works pretty well for our web developer, or database admin, but not so much for the support folks. Aside from the obvious need for someone to actually be there to replace hardware, support positions work much better when you know, and interact with the people you're supporting. Having your help desk staff be some random stranger on the phone is never as good. Cheaper, probably, but never as good as having someone you know and see on a regular basis on the other end of that phone.

Litigation Support, is more a mixed bag. Certainly, some of the work with data could be done from anywhere with access to the network, but being around to advise, and help the litigation process as it relates to technology isn't really something that you can do from home. It wouldn't be the same if you don't have a relationship with the attorneys.

Labels: HelpDesk, LitigationSupport

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Neat tools

All courtesy of the latest issue of Support Alert:

Free online media files converter, YouConvertIt.

A collection of more web browsers than I've ever heard of.

Decode those winmail.dat attachments you get from silly Outlook users.

Tech Repair Tools of the Week.

All worth a bookmark, in case you ever need them. ;)

Labels: HelpDesk, Tech

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How would you explain it?

OK so it's a simple concept to most of you guys, but obviously, our various users don't quite grasp this, and I'm wondering what the best way to explain it is. Here's the scenario:

User needs data copied to a laptop from the network so he can work on it offline from some other location that does not have internet access. The required "stuff" you've been asked to copy is 17GB worth of data, which then needs to be loaded into database program and configured correctly. User expects to be able to pick up laptop in an hour or so.

Now, most of us can imagine that copying 17GB of data off a network server, in the middle of the work day, simply takes some time! A lot of users though, just don't comprehend this. They don't understand the size of the data, how that translates to moving it, and what that means in terms of time.

So, IT folks, how do you explain it to folks who obviously don't get it?

Labels: HelpDesk, Tech

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WinXP News, now with Vista News too!

One of the better newsletters out there for those of us who wind up supporting users on Windows XP, is WinXP News, by Sunbelt Software. In tomorrow's edition, comes news that they'll be starting up a separate newsletter called Vista News, which I'm thinking wouldn't be a bad idea to get as well, because we'll be supporting users on Windows Vista soon enough, if not already!

Labels: HelpDesk, Tech

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New IT Policy -Humor

I can't take credit for this, but this afternoon I got the following email from our Helpdesk Manager:

1.  Before you go to a desk, send the attached file with instructions for the user not to open it until a helpdesk technician is at their desk.

2.  Go to the user's desk, put your hands on your hips and tell the user to open the attached file.

Link

I couldn't help but laugh, and promise to put it online.

 

Labels: Fun/Games, HelpDesk

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The Process, not the Results

One of the bigger adjustments from working tech support to working Litigation Support is the focus. When you're doing help desk stuff, the focus is on finding a solution, and getting folks back to work. When you're doing Litigation Support, especially when it's involves case work, it is all about following the process, and ignoring the results.

So, for example, when we're handling evidence, it's all about following the proper procedure. You cannot, ethically, be concerned about how this evidence affects the case, you just have to process it. (Most of the time, we don't really know enough about the case to be concerned, and we don't even look at it in any detail. We just follow the process.)

So, any work I do gets done the same way, every time. Even if we do all the work to prepare for trial, and the case settles out of court, we still do the work.  We still prepare as though they're all going to trial, even though a good percentage of the time, that work ends up being wasted. You just never know which case is going to settle, which is going to trial, which is going to get delayed, which will be appealed, etc.

So, the results vary, all the time, irregardless of the quality of our work, so you can't worry about them. you just follow the procedures, and let the attorney's worry about the results.

Labels: HelpDesk, LitigationSupport

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Where was this 2 years ago?

When I was switching jobs, leaving a place where I was the only IT person and trying to document everything I did and leave instructions about how to do it, I seriously could have used this Lifehack article about How to Give Instructions.

I can definitely attest to how difficult it is to put yourself in the place of someone coming in with no knowledge of how to do something, when you've been doing it for so many years. I especially like the idea of documenting not just the procedures but also what to anticipate when it succeeds and what it will look like when something goes wrong. So often when dealing with some task we have done for years, we don't think about how it looks when it fails, we just know the warning signs when we see them. That doesn't really help someone doing it for the first time.

As tech support professionals, we should be documenting not just how to do something, but how to tell if it's working, and what to do if it doesn't. Too often, that information doesn't get included, even though it sure would be helpful!

Labels: HelpDesk

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Couldn't Agree More

Linda Marie:

First and foremost, if you do not have people skills, you should not look for a help desk position.

That's absolutely true. The other thing that IT people at all levels tend to forget is what their role in any organization is. There's a certain amount of power that goes with operating any technology infrastructure, but too many IT people lose sight of the fact that the infrastructure only exists to help other people get the actual work of the organization done. They are your customers, and even though some of them give us plenty of "stupid user" stories to laugh about, ultimately, you're there to serve them.

Labels: HelpDesk

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Ribbon-esque

I had the opportunity today to try and help someone use CT Summation over the phone. Even though I've been using the program pretty extensively for a couple of weeks, it wasn't until today that I made the connection to Office 2007.

You see, in Summation, your toolbars, and menus change based on what part of the database has "focus". There are certain features that are either not available at all, or located in a very different place if you aren't currently focused on the image, the OCR document, the Case Explorer, etc.

As I was trying to help someone do an OCR search, I realized just how difficult it can be to walk them through things because you can't see where the focus is. It then dawned on me that if we ever move to Office 2007, the users who have been using Summation will have one big advantage and be higher along the learning curve then those who haven't. On the other hand, I realized that doing phone support for folks is going to be a bit more complicated. You'll have to make sure you have the correct view as the first step before you start walking them through a solution, otherwise you may wind up giving instructions that the user can't follow.

Either way, I'm glad we won't be making that upgrade for a long time. :)

Labels: HelpDesk, LitigationSupport

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Swatting flies

I read with interest the post by Security Monkey today about swatting flies, not because I don't agree with him about his point, but his example really brought to mind another of my pet peeves about working in IT generally, but Help Desk specifically. Let's start with his example:

Your help desk reports to you (the local security monkey) that users are no longer able to browse the internet via your proxy server. The users say that they keep getting "Cannot load page" messages.

A quick test from your desk works just fine. Obviously the users are just doing something wrong, right? All 200 of them!

You check the proxy server, the authentication daemon, the internet connection and then read all 200 service tickets again.

"It must be a client configuration error. Call up all the users and walk them through configuring their browser to use the proxy."

Several hours later (and $X^100 of wasted staff salary) you strike up a conversation with one of the infrastructure network engineers. He mentions a recent struggle with running out of address space on a few of the user subnets and then mentions a change on the firewall which performs a dynamic network address translation function to make all the users appear to come from one reserved IP in the DMZ.

You nearly drop your coffee cup. Why?

You know that the proxy server is configured to only respond to private address space behind the firewall, not the firewall's actual IP address.

A quick dash to your desk and many minutes later you reconfigure the proxy and users start to gain internet access again.

In other words, the hours that you spent swatting at that fly with the flyswatter could have been saved if you just realized that the fly was buzzing around your head because your shampoo smelled like a rotting animal corpse.

Now when I read this example, my first thought was not that there was time wasted not looking deep enough into the problem. There was, no question, but even more aggravating, there was help desk and security pro's time wasted tracking down something that should have been documented and communicated throughout the IT department. It'd be nice if everyone was communicating about the infrastructure, and the network guy was aware that the proxy server would be affected by the firewall change, and communicated that to the appropriate folks, and the help desk was notified that there was a firewall configuration change made and to make note of any problems that resulted from the change. Surely a help desk guy who knows the networking folks made a firewall change, who suddenly sees 200 tickets relating to Internet access would connect the dots and hand it off to the networking folks who made the change to investigate instead of the security guy who hasn't made any changes to the proxy server, right?

Unfortunately, I know all to well that in the real world, this lack of documentation and communication is all too common.

Labels: HelpDesk

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Classic Mistake

Kevin Devin posted something today about his workplace, wondering if the snake of Corporate IT was eating it's own tail.

When I read his story, one part jumped out at me immediately. Here was a classic example of tech support folks not having the authority, or tools, to correct a problem for a user. If I were one of those help desk guys, I might have gone ahead and made the call, regardless of the time difference. If you want to keep the control and authority and don't want your front line support people to have the power to fix a problem, then you have to deal with the calls at all hours.

Maybe I'm just a bit jaded after working tech support for so long. ;)

Labels: HelpDesk

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Proper information

One of the comments Phil made in the interview yesterday stuck out to me as I went back and read it again this evening:

I stress how important it is that we get all the documentation, that we get our Fact Sheet filled out so when people call about things, we can at least answer the basic questions

It struck me because I would guess it takes a whole lot of effort to get people to think about those sort of things up front. I know even within some IT Departments I'm familiar with that a project is usually in it's final stages, at best, before anyone even considers what sort of questions will be directed at the helpdesk because of this project and what information they will need to answer those questions. Sometimes the help desk staff has to go and find the information after the questions have already started coming in. That's got to be one of the biggest frustrations among help desk staff, and help desk managers alike.

The bottom line for you IT folks out there, remember to keep your front-line support techs in the loop. It will save you a ton of headaches, and negative feelings, later.

Labels: HelpDesk

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Interview with Phil Gerbyshak

A while back, you'll recall that Phil did an interview with me about working at the help desk. Since he's a help desk manager, I thought it would be interesting to get some input from him about the management side of things. He was kind enough to take the time and respond to my questions, which I am posting below.

BTW, you can learn more about Phil at his blog, Make it Great, where you can also find links to purchase his book, 10 Ways to Make it Great. He also wanted me to let folks know that he will be speaking at the upcoming Help Desk Institute's Annual Conference, so if you're attending, be sure to look him up and say hi!

Q: Tell me a little bit about how you became a help desk manager, how
you got started in IT, how you developed into a manager, and anything
else about Phil that relates.

A: I started out as a tech support guy in the Navy, way back in 1992. When I got out of the Navy in 1996, I wanted nothing to do with computers, so I went to school to be a teacher. While at college, I started designing websites and teaching people how to use the programs on their computer. I dropped out of college and went to work at a local ISP as a tech support specialist, taking many calls from people using our dial up ISP, so I learned fast how to troubleshoot things, how to say the same things 50 ways, and how to think on my feet. Eventually I moved to a help desk, offering internal tech support assistance. When my manager decided he loved the Marine Corps more than he loved his job, I was promoted to manager.

Q. Tell us a little something about the help desk you manage, how many people you manage, what kind of support they're giving.

A: We are an internal and external support team, supporting 2200+ internal associates, and all of our external clients (77000 are signed up for online access, with more signing up every day). We have 7 people plus me on the help desk, and we answer all sorts of questions, from hardware problems, to how to use the Microsoft Office suite to how to use a financial planning system, and everywhere in between. We close between 80 and 85 percent of all calls into the IT department, and we use the Single Point of Contact (SPOC) model for IT, so all calls and e-mails come through us.

Q. How do you measure success? How do you identify your top
performers, and how do you reward them?

A: Success is a measure of quality, and how satisfied our clients are with the service we provide. We focus on fixing the customer just as much as we focus on fixing the person. We measure this by the amount of positive e-mail responses we get back, how many "blue chips" (we're a financial services company, so these are our internal gratitude notes) one receives, how the rest of the team perceives your value with an associate of the month program, and also with the Big FISH! program, where others in IT can nominate someone to receive an award for displaying the FISH! philosophy traits.

We reward folks monthly with an associate of the month award, which is nominated by others on the Desk, monthly with a big FISH! award, nominated by others in IT, quarterly with a quarterly associate of the month award as determined by overall quality, and annually with a merit raise and merit bonus. These are our team measures of success.

From external clients, we get blue chips awarded monthly, and annually the top 2% of blue chip winners get recognized firm-wide with a trophy and a nice gift.

Q. What kind of qualities do you look for in new hires? In potential managers/supervisors?

A: In new hires, I look first for attitude. Is this person willing and able to work with people who may be less tech savvy than they are, and are they willing to do so without talking down to them.

Next, I look for demonstrated excellence. Has someone been associate of the month/quarter/year somewhere else. Have they made the Dean's list at college. Do they have e-mails from clients that state what a great job they've done.

I also look for communication skills. Can you communicate verbally and written, with me, and with customers. I ask folks to demonstrate their communication skills by walking me through something complex, and I evaluate their step by step communication abilities, as well as their temperament, because they need to be patient on the phone.

Technical aptitude is important too, but this is really a given. If someone gets past our recruiters, they have some experience on a Help Desk or in customer serivce. We can gauge this by certifications, degrees, and past experiences. I'll dig on this a bit, but the first 3 are FAR more important than the last one.

I don't hire managers or supervisors, so it's tough to answer this question. I think the answer to your next question will help you with finding out the qualities I think are necessary for management.

Q. What's the one biggest difference between working in IT, and being a manager?

A: Working in IT is a lot of troubleshooting, a lot of break/fix, and a lot of the same types of problems, every day. Basically, you get password resets, how-to questions, break/fix, and a few where you need to do a deep dive to find the answer. Granted, the how-to questions are not the same, and the people are different and respond differently every day, so there's plenty of opportunity for new learning.

As a manager, it's almost all deep dive into items, working with people to help them find fulfillment in solving problems. As a manager, I am responsible for many of the processes we use to solve things, or at least to find one way of doing things. I don't dictate anything, I suggest things as a possible solution, with the rare exception of policies that must be followed for the good of the team and the good of the firm. That's the management part.

I'm also a coach, working with my team to develop them as people, and to help them leverage their unique strengths the best way possible. Some folks are much more process driven, so I put them on documentation projects. Some like to see a finished product, so I put them on reporting projects. Some are people folks, so I have them do the tougher client call backs. Knowing and utilizing these strengths is a big part of what I do every day. I also take time to help my team write out their goals, what's important to them, where they want to be at the end of this year, 3 years, 5 years, or however far out they want to look, and help them find the intermediate steps necessary to get there. I often need to look at projects and how I can plug them into projects in meaningful ways.

The last part of my job as a manager is sales and PR. In projects, I am constantly selling the value of our team, and in how important it is that folks get us the documentation early so we can start testing an application before it goes firm-wide. I stress how important it is that we get all the documentation, that we get our Fact Sheet filled out so when people call about things, we can at least answer the basic questions. And the PR part is done when I handle escalatations, or I go to events, or I sit in projects, and people ask us what we do and how we do it, and I explain it in a way that helps them know why we're a key part of the entire process.

Q. Anything else that I'm missing? Any parting words of advice for those of us working the help desk in furthering our careers?

A: Don't be afraid to fail. Wayne Gretsky said you miss 100% of the shots you don't take, and on the Help Desk, you get the chance to take a LOT of shots. Take advantage of every opportunity presented to you, and learn from your mistakes.

Never stop learning, about yourself, about the business, about your customers, about yourself. Ask what's needed, and do it, and MORE. Technology changes, people changes, you change. Focus on learning as much about everything as you can, and you'll be invaluable to your firm. Many folks remember the technology side, but knowing the business is just as, and in many cases MORE important, than the tech side. As a Help Desk professional, if you're not an integral part of the business, you could get outsourced.

Don't take anything personally. People get frustrated with the technology because they don't understand it, and they take it out on you. Don't take it personally, because 99% of the time, they aren't mad at you.

Lastly, smile. All the time. Because there is no better feeling than knowing you helped someone get what they needed done, just in in the nick of time. You are more valuable than you'll ever know, so smile and know that.

--

Thanks Phil. I appreciate the insight you've provided in these answers. I'll have some more to say about them in future posts this week, but for now, let's hear your thoughts? What do you think about help desk management?

Labels: HelpDesk

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A perfect example

I've mentioned before why I think measuring the effectiveness of your help desk folks by looking at the number of tickets they work alone is dumb. This week, I had a perfect example.

We had one of our pool laptops lose a hard drive this week. The replacement drive came in Thursday late in the day, so I set out Friday morning to swap the drive and start the process of installing Windows XP and all the various device drivers, getting all the updates, installing Office and all the other extraneous software (A-V, VPN, Adobe Reader, etc.) that our users might require when traveling with this laptop.

I also answered a few help desk calls/emails while this process was ongoing, but, obviously, not nearly as many as the other people working the help desk that day. If you pulled a report from our help desk software for that day, it'd look like maybe I didn't do as much work as the other folks, when, in fact, I probably did more. It just so happens that one of my tickets was an all-day project. If we were using number of tickets as an important metric, I wouldn't have focused on getting this laptop done, and available for our users, I would have focused on closing more tickets, because that's what I'm being measured by.

On the other hand, I know what was better use of my time in terms of providing support, and that wasn't worrying about the number of tickets I worked.

Labels: HelpDesk

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Might be time for an upgrade

We frequently do business with a firm that prepares reports for us, stuff like environmental impact studies, etc. that they in turn make available to us for download from their website. Since the clients want us to send them a CD copy of the report, and since most of our users don't have CD burners, we get the unique pleasure of grabbing these reports and burning them to CD.

Doesn't sound like a big deal, right? Only, it usually is. You see this firm, I'm guessing, uses this approach to all their work, and must have a whole lot of people trying to access their various reports at the same time. At least that's the only explanation I have for the ridiculously slow download speeds. The other day, I needed to grab a 9MB PDF from their site. It took me all afternoon. The first three attempts timed out at some point in the download. The 4th attempt completed in about 2 1/2 hours. Yes, I was getting a whopping 1.2 Kb/sec download speed. (That was the average, I actually saw it go as low as 897 bytes/sec. at one point.)

I'm not trying to tell anyone how to do business, and I'm certainly not trying to come off like more of a network guru than I am, but it seems like having some more pipe to your webserver, and maybe even some more processing power on that server, would save your customers some headaches, wouldn't it?

Labels: HelpDesk, Tech

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How much is too much?

I've always been of the belief that whenever you're dealing with end users, the more information you could give them and the more ways they could access knowledge, the better. A couple of things recently have me questioning that theory.

One was this whole DST mess. If there was one constant in all the things we did it was this. Every communication we sent to users in the hope of limiting some help desk calls by supplying information ahead of time, only resulted in more help desk calls. Instead of people reading the email, following the directions and going about their lives without the need to involve tech support folks, they called to ask questions about the email. Even people who didn't actually need to do anything different from what they always have been, called to make sure they didn't need to do anything. It seemed like the more we tried to educate people about the issue, and what to expect, the more it just confused them. A handful of people literally just took to ignoring any emails that came from the IS department, figuring we'd fix whatever needed to be fixed later for them.

Here was a case where our attempts at sharing information backfired completely. It illustrates to me that when it comes to technical information, there is a saturation point where users simply tune you out.

It was with this new illustration that I had in mind when I was spending some time looking over some helpdesk software. The front page of the software for an end user presented them with three options, submit a ticket, search the knowledge base, or post a question in the forums. My immediate thought was, for many people, this is one option too many, maybe even two options too many. Many of my users would never bother to post a forum question. Why would they when what they really want is someone in IT to fix something for them or show them how to do something? They already have the option to submit a question to IT where it will be assigned to someone to handle, why post it on a forum and wait for "someone" to answer? Perhaps other organizations would have a different expectation, but in terms of where I work, that's probably just going to confuse people about how to submit a question, which will prompt them to call. *L*

It also got me to thinking about all the different tools we have now to train users. We do screencasts, webinars, podcasts, classroom training, one on one training, printed materials, etc. At what point do we offer a user looking for training information too many options? Isn't there some point where a user goes to the training page on the intranet, is overwhelmed by the choices, and just says "nevermind"? I think there very well might be, but I also think that point is individual to each user, so how do you plan around it?

Labels: HelpDesk

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OLK

You know what I really love about Office 2007? Microsoft finally got wise to the number of people who make changes to email attachments and lose them.

We don't use Office 2007 at work, and I can't tell you