Examples on Increasing Productivity: Part 2 (For Managers)

A reader asked me a good question: "Would you provide concrete examples on how to increase the productivity of my Production Support team?" Although I'll answer with points that would be important for any team, not just Support, I'll provide examples that apply more directly to Production Support groups.

This is Part 2 of this article. Click on the link to go to Part 1.

The first thing you can do as a manager is to set high expectations for yourself and your team. This means two things set expectations and make sure they're challenging enough. One thing that has worked great for me is doing strategic planning at the beginning of every year with all my directs. We keep it simple. We identify things we'd like to improve about the applications we support (The Challenges). Then we come up with Action Items. Action Items define three things (Where we are, Where we want to be, and what we're going to do to get there). Incidentally, there's a technical name for just talking about the challenges and not coming up with what you're going to do to fix them...It's called complaining.

Make sure the action items achievable (yes, you can use SMART goals), but make sure they'll also challenge your team to do their best. Having clear guidelines and defined projects has worked wonders for the amount of work that my groups achieve. People don't come into work wondering what they're going to do. If the BAU work (incidents, service requests, etc.) is low, then it's time to pull out the plan and work on those strategic objectives. I review plan progress on a weekly basis and provide quarterly updates to senior management to ensure my directs' work is being highlighted and they're getting the right visibility level.

Keep a constant eye for ways to maximize the productivity of your team. Just because you have a plan doesn't mean you can't include important items on the go. Also, if something that was previously identified as important, no longer is, then remove it from the plan. Work only on those things that will add value to your group.

As I've said in prior posts, take time to reward and reinforce productive behaviors. Production Support teams go through a lot of stress and team members need to know that their work is not going unnoticed.

Finally, use your metrics to determine areas for improvement and to track how Productive your teams are being. If all the work you've planned to do is not having a positive impact on your Availability metrics, Support effort, Time tracking, etc., then you're not focusing on the right things. Keep the Purpose of Production Support in mind in everything that you do.

Examples on Increasing Productivity: Part 1 (For Associates)

A reader asked me a good question: "Would you provide concrete examples on how to increase the productivity of my Production Support team?" Although I'll answer with points that would be important for any team, not just Support, I'll provide examples that apply more directly to Production Support groups.

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.