So, let's start with what you can do as an associate to improve the productivity of your team. There's an implication, here, and that is, that productivity increases are not just the responsibility of managers (though we'll talk about things managers can do). First of all, be open, ask your manager the question "What can we do to be more Productive?" Many times as Support groups, we get bogged down in the day-to-day, tactical, activities and we don't spend enough time thinking strategically. A question like this one, during a team meeting, might spark a conversation with your entire group about the things that can be put in place. Collect those ideas and come up with approaches to get them effected.
Another thing you can do is determine what you can do to increase internal and external client satisfaction. Let me provide an example of each:
- Internal: I just had a conversation last night with one of my directs. A user had asked a question and it was taking longer than normal to resolve it. The gist of it was that it was a different Support group who should have been handling the query, but somehow it landed on my team's lap. What my team had done was forward the e-mail to the other Support group and there had been no response. My challenge to the team was that we should take more ownership of issues. It would have been better to call the user to clarify the problem. Instead of sending an e-mail, it would have been better to engage the other Support group directly, over the phone, so that a richer conversation could have happened. This would have been a great opportunity to transfer accountability, reassign tickets, convey urgency, etc.
- External: In a prior gig I had, we had many institutional banking customers who connected to our systems to receive prices on financial instruments. If a client was not connected to us, they were also not dealing with us. This means loss of revenue, of course. The went through the logs and found out approximate times that customers normally connected (we didn't have documented SLAs, a problem we inherited). We set up monitoring for each customer and we put a threshold on the monitoring such that, if they didn't connect after a period of time from when they normally did, an alert showed up in our dashboards. This prompted us to call the client and ask them to connect. Many times they didn't know they weren't connected. This small effort increased revenues for the bank and customers really appreciated being notified.
Even associates can help when it comes to expense reduction. I was at a company where we used a monitoring tool that cost over $1MM in licensing annually. It was quite feature rich, great graphical interface, etc. But as it turns out, we needed something a bit more basic. A simple dashboards that would display alerts was all that we needed. Most of the Support people in my group had Development backgrounds, so we took on a project to build a monitoring tool. A few months later we delivered the tool and were actually able to replace the vended software. We saved that $1MM in expense.
Increasing productivity might also be defined as stopping low value tasks and doing more productive tasks. I was in a Support group where the monitoring was quite noisy. There were tons of alerts and people would clear them out every day. Day in, day out, clear the alert. Repeat. Doing this is low value. Instead, we cleaned up the monitoring. We put a list together of noisy, false-positives and embarked on a project to clean them up: configuring the tool to ignore some, reclassifying the severity of the alert, removing the alert from the code altogether, etc. The now quiet monitoring tool enabled us to focus on more value added tasks, like building automation and putting together tools to help the support effort.
If you are a manager, click here to go to Part 2 of this article.
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