Reply to post: I was a great example of this in one contract

I was a great example of this in one contract

I was tasked with reducing the number of incidents a service desk was dealing with. Server side only, the desktop call center was separate. Not my usual line by a longshot, but I took the contract as a few years earlier I briefly dated the woman who oversaw the service desk contract for the managed services provider, and I was able to negotiate a huge rate with her boss.

So I took the approach of figuring out what were the top ten most common incidents, reviewing the information in the tickets about resolution, and trying to find permanent fixes or at least ways of reducing the incidents. Some were not really solvable - one of the big hitters was due to Exchange servers having resource issues like memory or disk and fix was a reboot. All I could do was recommend increasing those resources which of course they wouldn't do because that costs money lol! Some I was able to solve and massively reduce tickets.

One eluded me entirely. This was a Fortune 100 manufacturing company, so of course IT spending wasn't a high priority. Thus there were still some Novell servers about despite the year being 2008 and Novell being woefully obsolete. I figured perhaps due to their age or increasing demand placed upon hardware that couldn't handle it, or both, they were well up the top ten cause of incidents. The thing is, there were never any information in the tickets about the nature of the problem or its resolution. The issue description would be "performance issues" and the resolution field "performance issues resolved". WTF?

To get more information, I emailed a few of the people who had resolved those tickets, but got no response. After trying that a few times I had the "ex" who brought me on board email them telling them who I was and that they needed to respond. The responses I got from them though were terse and evasive.

Eventually I gained their trust enough to get the true story. These Novell servers were on factory floors, and while it isn't clear exactly what they did they needed to function for the assembly line to move. When something goes wrong on the line, like a part is upside down or whatever the assembly line needs to halted to correct the issue. If they press the big button they have to write up some sort of report on the issue, supervisors come down to the floor, it is a big show the line workers don't want to deal with. If they unplug the network cable from the Novell server, the line stops but without all the attention, they can take a minute or two to resolve the issue then plug the server back in and the line resumes on its own.

When line stoppages due to Novell servers started happening a lot more often bosses started asking questions about why they aren't asking for them to be fixed, so they started opening tickets to cover it. Apparently at some point they had explained to the service desk people that they didn't really need to do anything for the terse "performance issues" tickets, just close them. Which they were fine with, as it helped their metrics for ticket resolution. It sounds like everyone in the factory including supervisors was in the know, as well as the service desk people, it just hadn't been communicated to the managed services provider. But since their profit is basely mostly on meeting timely incident resolution KPIs, incidents that are instantly resolved turn out to be a win for them too.

So unlike our hero in the article I ignored these tickets as there was no "fix" needed. Or possible.