Not sure what kind of plane this is. The approach path for George Bush Intercontinental Airport (IAH in code) goes right over my sister-in-law's house. So, sitting here on the pool deck, I can watch the planes go by. That's how I saw that Antonov last week.
Today was my first real day back at Helpdesk. The last few days I had been able to take it slow. It's tough to predict Helpdesk volume and while I suppose I hoped this week would be slow, I didn't really know. I could have just as easily come back to skyrocketing volume.
But it was slow and I was able to think about things and consider projects and the next steps therein. Today saw me dive deep into one of the projects. I'm prepping an outside team to take calls for us overnight and on the weekends. This involves plugging a bunch of data into a series of forms that will get presented to the techs during calls. It's tedious work and there isn't a lot of data to give them.
Indeed, one of the issues that we consistently have at this Helpdesk is lack of information. In a lot of respects, we operate like many smaller IT firms. We walk into a company and don't know what's going on and we have very little power to make things better. This sounds like a cop-out -- it is to some extent -- but most of these customer types simply can't or won't afford the things that lend stability to the organization.
This leads to a lot of time needed to simply discover What's Going On. It's harder when you're remote. All of our remote technologies notwithstanding, missing or incomplete information can turn a five minute call into 30 minutes. Few things are more frustrating than knowing a tiny bit of forethought on the part of the IT company would have saved me a heck of a lot of time.
But everyone has this problem. It's a constant stressor for Helpdesks, IT Companies, Corporations... There's a lot of blame and sympathy to go around.
So, I'm entering this psuedo-data into the forms for this overnight Helpdesk. They actually do a pretty good job considering what little they have. What's most encouraging, however, is that the IT company realizes this situation is difficult. They've made wonderful progress in getting everything organized. They have it harder than most, however. They manage the IT services (among other things) for dozens of sports-themed locations all over the U.S. Each site has a "computer guy" who likes to do things his own way. It's going to take them a long time pull it all together, but they are doing it.
Beyond that one project, of course, I was taking calls. I handled a slightly difficult one and was able to really see my descent into frustration and anger. Fortunately, I came out on top in the end. It's helping me clarify an entry I'm putting together for the blog about the five biggest reasons why working a helpdesk is so tough.
High-larious.
George Lucas slaved over the first Star Wars drafts for several years. In all, there were four official drafts and countless smaller changes along the way. He showed the drafts to many, many people. Colleagues even reshaped some of the characters before production. As you can imagine, the first drafts and plot points were not much like the final film.
About eight years ago, I became a full-time professional writer. I left a job in the print industry and decided to write full-time. Before that moment, I had some marginal success writing for The Times Picayune, New Orleans' daily. But, as one would do, I believed I could make it, despite the fact that a "feature" for the Times-Picayune paid a mere $200.00 and took not a small amount of time to write.
Writing for me was excruciating, as it was (is?) for Lucas. What I wrote was never good enough. I filled my head with mentors who would scream things like, "It opens too much like a TV news story" and "Is this even an article? WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?!" I tried mightily to participate in mail-lists for draft critiques. Considering what I had already implanted into my head, you can imagine those far away voices didn't sit well with me. Bereft of their cues that come with in-person communications, these quasi-anonymous "thoughts," all sounded like screeds. Everyone hated what I was doing. Really! What am I thinking?
Yet I managed to soldier on for about two years. Toward the end of it all, I won placement in a Best Of contest, I had written for all kinds of magazines, and was even paid a cool $1000.00 for a single article. It seems I achieved, at least, moderate success.
But I did it in complete solitude. I read a lot of books about writing and so many of them enforced the idea that writers were intensely solitary creatures. What's more, they wanted to be solitary and only the good writers kept completely to themselves. Those murals of collaborating writers in Barnes & Noble? Lies!
George Lucas' endeavors, as I have seen now, were (are?) much more collaborative. Yes, it's his film. Yes, it's his story. But many people helped him along the way to create the movies that shaped millions of minds. They challenged him. They disagreed with him. They made him reconsider his babies. And while there were many, many nights of excruciating mental pain, everyone helped him to make a better story.
Collaboration worked.
I am simply much more sociable than I was eight years ago. I don't take things as personally as I once did and aren't as quick to blame inherent personal defects as a problem's cause. Certainly part of this has come from the time I ran my own business and networked with hundreds of people. Were I a "professional writer" today, I would collaborate. Indeed, I do it now for all manner of things.
We are all better for collaboration. Get out of your offices and rooms and go talk to people. Everything and anything said can help you see things for the better.
My helpdesk uses a large amount of remote access technologies to access user workstations. The primary reason we use so many is that our clients use so many. Sure there are large players in this space with well-designed and easy-to-use technologies that we could use for everyone, but our clients ultimately pay for this. Their pocketbooks rule here.
There is one particular client we use as a fall-back for when any of the others don't work. I call it the "on-demand ISL client." The company calls it ISLLight.
ISLLight serves us well. I can't believe it's ever failed in all of the years we've used it.
But I am beginning to look at alternatives.
Right now, we have about five technicians and a triage desk. Our triage desk processes calls and preps them for the technicians who actually speak to the user. It has its flaws, but works okay. One flaw is we didn't really anticipate the need for someone fairly technical in that triage desk. Calls are not as well prepped and sometimes miss data that a lightly seasoned technical person would intuit.
So, I plan to make Triage a Tier 1. This allows for callers to get right to a technician. I anticipate we'll do a hybrid Tier 1/Triage for awhile. If a Tier 1 tech is not available, then Triage will get it and just process the call as before.
As I look at birthing that new desk, I am reminded of the time where all technicians picked up calls live. We had little documentation and were frequently on calls for a long time with all the discovery we had to do. So, a lot of calls went to voice mails. Customers complained. Rightly so! We hardly ever answered live.
Tier 1 will be aimed at giving very quick solutions. If one is not available, then it goes into Tier 2 where most of the techs live and can work longer.
Speed is paramount. Tier 1 will need to be able to get a ticket started, remote to a user's workstation if necessary, and work out a solution or workaround within 15 minutes. I want Tier 1 to feel like they can succeed, that they are not professional apologizers. So, I have to make sure I get anything excessive out of their way so they can, as I say, "Just Be a Tech."
ISLLight has some very big benefits:
1. It's un-branded. (Our helpdesk is not branded. The user calls the IT company, not "Dove Help Desk."
2. The executable is small.
3. There's really no install to set it up.
4. It's fairly simple to use.
So, what's my beef? Simply that for most of our users, remoting takes too long. Here's the process:
1. Download executable. Click Run.
2. Click Run again on Security Warning dialogue.
3. Type in a code. (This code is generated on my side.)
4. Click Connect.
5. Click the Show button when it pops up.
6. Find and click the "Grant Control" button.
Yeah, it's not too bad, but there are many places where the user simply trips up.
1. Sometimes the users have trouble with the download URL. It's simpler now, but we occasionally run into issues with people typing in ALL CAPS or mishearing letters or numbers.
2. Oftentimes, users don't understand how to save something to the desktop for later use. (You'd be surprised how often this comes up.) So, we wind up running it from the URL to save us some time.
3. We often have to explain more than once that the "Show button" will pop-up and they are to click it.
4. The "Grant Control" button is hard to find. This is a design issue, IMHO. The Grant Control button is placed and designed in a way that users can't initially see. It's clear to me, but often not to them.
There are many things that we could do to make it simpler for us and the user. I recognize that. We could bookmark the download URL. We could get into the machine once and put ISL on the desktop for them. Those are valid steps and we may indeed take them.
But what if I can find something that's much quicker? Maybe something that doesn't require any sort of installation or URL? Or, if it does, requires pre-setup of these tools as a condition of offering Tier 1 for that line. (Otherwise, that customer's users get Triage only.)
I have tried out a few others, most notably Bomgar, but I am finding that either the steps either do not decrease in number or there is a large degree of setup that needs to occur before the user calls. The last will never be perfect. Companies hire people all the time. We rarely know who will be calling.
Bomgar may be promising. I don't feel that it really decreases the steps and would work better with some pre-setup, but what it does is pretty fast. I am going to try it with my techs this week and see how they feel it works. This should be, after all, a joint decision.
And, at the end, we may just stick with ISLLight and force ourselves to do more pre-setup.
