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I work for a pretty big tech support company here that manages multiple clients, some big some small, and they're starting to do a process called Cross training and it's really annoying the crap out of me. Basically they aim to merge every single team on our floor so that everybody is trained for pretty much all our clients. Which is a lot. A lot of clients. The biggest problem I have is that most clients have their own ticketing system because they want to have control over them. So that means I have about 4 different ticketing system and more to come with the cross training. This isn't normal is it? I mean poo poo, I can barely keep up, I'm already managing 7 clients (some of them barely call, which means I forget all about their internal applications, one of them I don't even remember how to log into their system). They also keep us spread so thin with insanely high SLAs that if 2 people call in sick or go on vacation at the same time, we're screwed for the week or sometimes, month. So instead of hiring new people so that the teams are well managed, they're just pooling all the employees into one big pile and therefore sacrificing call quality, which makes the clients angry, it makes us angry and just further stresses Tier 1 agents out. Maybe this is just normal for big companies but most of my coworkers are sick and tired of this constant addition of new calls so most of them are quitting but I never see any new faces, it's always someone from another team joining us but still taking calls from their old team. It's insane. Sorry about the nonsensical rant
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May 19, 2015 14:52
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| # ? May 17, 2024 02:44 |
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Congrats man!
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May 19, 2015 15:06
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Prepare to be the walking dead for the first 4 months or so. It does get better though. I mean, I have no idea what you're talking about.
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May 19, 2015 15:14
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Lysdexique posted:So instead of hiring new people so that the teams are well managed, they're just pooling all the employees into one big pile and therefore sacrificing call quality, which makes the clients angry, it makes us angry and just further stresses Tier 1 agents out. Are we playing Jeopardy? When you operations are border line financially viable guess what happens?
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May 19, 2015 15:25
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:My wife is a thing which I can neither confirm nor deny because it's not confirmed until about 3 months in so I would never dare to hint at anything ahead of time RIP your disposable income. On the other hand, mid-senior level IT with work from home is about as prepared as you can be for whatever it is you're talking about.
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May 19, 2015 16:14
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What are you guys talking about I just meant she has been slowly leveling a healer so we can raid together what else could I have meant 
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May 19, 2015 16:18
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:What are you guys talking about I just meant she has been slowly leveling a healer so we can raid together what else could I have meant That's what I was talking about, once my wife got a healer going we just raided til 3am every day.
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May 19, 2015 16:25
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I think you should have had her level a summoner class instead.
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May 19, 2015 16:26
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You should have played TF2. 
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May 19, 2015 16:29
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It's 2015 and Internet Explorer still sucks? It doesn't outright crash but if click on something it'll open a few seconds later, when a page starts to load sometimes it'll load almost everything then spend 10 seconds on 2-3 remaining elements.
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May 19, 2015 18:12
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:What are you guys talking about I just meant she has been slowly leveling a healer so we can raid together what else could I have meant You definitely won't want to start reading this thread then.
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May 19, 2015 18:24
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4 months ago, we started putting together a new rule set for our transaction monitoring software. This required an update from RSA, which we got after working with them. All very pleasant, no issues. We get the new ruleset and software update into our Dev environment with no problems. I send in a ticket to get the software listed in our environment management. That never ends up happening, but whatever. We'll come back to that later. We get to testing in a new environment, and someone has taken away all my permissions to access the test environment, so I can't install this new ruleset or software upgrade. After much politicking and bullshit, my permissions get re-instated and I get everything running. Agreements are made that our team should have access to these testing environments for upgrades and management of the software. Then we get to the next round of testing, new environment and *hey look* permissions got taken away from that one too. Second verse, same as the first, politicking, bullshittery, and I can finally do my god damned job, only a week behind. More agreements are reached, promises made, "you guy own the software, you should have access to install it". Alright cool. It's been 3 months now. We've scheduled a final round of testing in pre-production. The day before doing the install to pre-prod, another team comes out of the woodwork "We are the only ones allowed to install anything in pre-prod or prod" ...no. "You can shadow one of our team members as they do the work" ...No. "You'll be working on our schedule, since you didn't give us ample time to plan this" ...loving NO. Talked it over with my boss (A Director) and he pulled rank on this team's boss (a manager). And I still got a lovely email berating me for "Going outside the process" and "Not giving [other team] enough time to perform their duties". A.) It's not your loving duties. B.) 4 months ago, I asked you to add something to the catalog. In that request, I asked you guys if you wanted to learn how this was done. I got nothing, not even the catalog entry I loving asked for. and C.) Don't snooty email me you son of a bitch. On top of all this, the other team is the group I used to work on. They never replaced my position, and lost another guy around the same time who has also not been replaced. So they're down staff, unprepared, hundreds of tickets unassigned in their queue, and *taking on more work* to ... prove a point? I don't even loving know at this point. tl:dr I did the damned work anyway. My last review I was told my work is good, but I need to be more assertive. Assertiveness achieved.
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May 19, 2015 18:25
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Tab8715 posted:It's 2015 and Internet Explorer still sucks?
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May 19, 2015 18:27
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Lysdexique posted:I work for a pretty big tech support company here that manages multiple clients, some big some small, and they're starting to do a process called Cross training and it's really annoying the crap out of me. Basically they aim to merge every single team on our floor so that everybody is trained for pretty much all our clients. Which is a lot. A lot of clients. A couple things for how we manage "cross training", but we don't really call it that. Good documentation is the key. Create run-books. I know people hate to be on the other end of that, but for Tier1/Help Desk they are vital if you are supporting a wide array of products or customer requirements. At Tier2, we assign two people as technical leads for a customer. Many people are leads for multiple customers. Leads are responsible for documenting the hell out of that customer. From contacts to processes to systems to case studies and post-mortems. All Tier 2 are familiar with all customers, and have access to the documentation so they don't have to sweat memorizing the specifics for any one customer. The Tier2 team leads/managers are the end of the line for support and are the SMEs for the various solutions and products in use (in our organization Tier3 are the actual engineers that design the product). They are responsible for making sure the customer leads do their stuff and are mentors to the rest of the team. They are also a kind of roving troubleshooter and particularly difficult or thorny cases are handled by them directly. For ticketing systems, we have a single, internal ticketing system for all customers. SLA information is baked in for each customer. For customers that just want to track tickets themselves, they have access to a portal. For customers that have requested integration into theirs, we use connectors (off the shelf or custom built) to bond our ticket with a corresponding ticket at the customer site. When one gets updated, so does the other. Proteus Jones fucked around with this message at 19:13 on May 19, 2015 |
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May 19, 2015 19:10
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flosofl posted:A couple things for how we manage "cross training", but we don't really call it that. Good documentation is the key. i know this is the thread for venti, i mean venting about work stuff but i find this sort of thing interesting.. any more stories?
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May 19, 2015 19:13
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A3th3r posted:i know this is the thread for venti, i mean venting about work stuff but i find this sort of thing interesting.. any more stories? Oh poo poo. I thought I was in "Working in IT" thread  This Thread is probably not appropriate for it, but if you have any questions you can ask over the other one and I'll see it. I'm usually on when I hit a lull in my workload or just need a break.
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May 19, 2015 19:20
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flosofl posted:Oh poo poo. I thought I was in "Working in IT" thread
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May 19, 2015 19:22
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dissss posted:I never got the point of external GPUs - it's only ever going to work at your desk anyway so why not just build an entire desktop and go for a more portable laptop? Because having two computers is annoying when just one is more than capable. You also get the fun of having to deal with licensing issues, not having access to some large critical file you forgot to save / transfer, and more. Having an external GPU that lets you have that good gaming rig, plus all your other stuff in one portable spot can be very nice. Things pissing me off today: Having issues building code because I can't access repositories due to roving LDAP issues.
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May 19, 2015 19:30
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:I'm in favor of a new thread which merges both of these. The working in IT and poo poo that pisses you off thread are really just a glorified conversation that we're all having, and don't mistake me, I love it, but I think the two threads are closer than some people might admit. Especially when a conversation that happens in one thread then happens a week later in the other, or at the same time because they already blend in everyone's mind. I'd say the ticket thread is the same thing, too. It's just "poo poo that pisses me off" where every post starts with "a [noun] came in"
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May 19, 2015 19:33
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Erwin posted:Especially when a conversation that happens in one thread then happens a week later in the other, or at the same time because they already blend in everyone's mind. I'd say this and "ticket" have much more reason to be mixed. The working in IT thread actually does touch on other topics like finding jobs, best ways to deal with other employees, bosses, contract situations, blah blah, and dumping all that into the same thread would get confusing. Also as much as conversations get duplicated, the threads get like 20-30 posts an hour each, so one thread would be pretty fast moving and remove opportunities to respond without seeming like you're dragging something up from long ago (especially for those of us who don't check the thread all the time - there have been times even with the current threads where I want to respond to something but it's four pages back from where the thread now is and I don't want to be that guy).
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May 19, 2015 19:45
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:I'm in favor of a new thread which merges both of these. The working in IT and poo poo that pisses you off thread are really just a glorified conversation that we're all having, and don't mistake me, I love it, but I think the two threads are closer than some people might admit. I don't think anybody has any illusions that there are really any difference in the 3 threads. The argument that shut down the 1 thread idea last time is that the thread moves too fast when it is combined, usually by folks who pretend they don't read all 3 anyway.
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May 19, 2015 19:48
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Sickening posted:I don't think anybody has any illusions that there are really any difference in the 3 threads. The argument that shut down the 1 thread idea last time is that the thread moves too fast when it is combined, usually by folks who pretend they don't read all 3 anyway. Yeah the tickets thread was intended to be for both that and this subject together, but it moved way too quickly so this was born.
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May 19, 2015 19:49
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kensei posted:Yeah the tickets thread was intended to be for both that and this subject together, but it moved way too quickly so this was born. I don't get that line of thinking. I don't get how reading two threads of the same subject is any harder to follow than one thread. The logic just doesn't make sense.
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May 19, 2015 19:50
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Things that piss me off: I used to work with a guy that didn't document anything. He did most of our setups, and I handled support. He told me once that if he documented his systems I wouldn't understand them anyways. I was so angry climbed up on my desk and yelled at him.
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May 19, 2015 19:51
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Sickening posted:I don't think anybody has any illusions that there are really any difference in the 3 threads. The argument that shut down the 1 thread idea last time is that the thread moves too fast when it is combined, usually by folks who pretend they don't read all 3 anyway. I feel like "ticket came in" is more anecdotes like 'hey, today I had a user who put a bunch of poo poo in /etc/hosts' and this thread is for daily poo poo like "jesus christ windows updates, stop randomly rebooting computers every time I turn around."
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May 19, 2015 20:01
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flosofl posted:
Dear god, I wish that was the case here, but too many of our contracts say that the client can choose the ticketing system and every time it becomes a huge cluster gently caress. I remember when I started working here like...7 years ago, we all used AR Remedy for our multi client teams and it went well, now it's just a huge mess. The only good news about that is that I have experience in a wide variety of ticket systems! 
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May 19, 2015 20:15
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Daylen Drazzi posted:I was under contract to Kodak at the time they declared bankruptcy
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May 19, 2015 20:43
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Sickening posted:I don't get that line of thinking. I don't get how reading two threads of the same subject is any harder to follow than one thread. The logic just doesn't make sense. I enjoy having all these posts to read, so me neither 
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May 19, 2015 21:17
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Daylen Drazzi posted:It's amazing how nice engineers become when they get a new computer out of the blue to replace the crap machine they've been hobbling along with for a couple of years It's also amazing how jealous people get when someone else's laptop gets replaced and theirs doesn't. Doesn't matter their old one is still in warranty and working fine and the ones actually being replaced are more than a year older.
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May 19, 2015 21:17
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poo poo pissing me off: ticket thread talk. If we combine them, it moves too fast. Also had to do some maintenance today on a laptop without an SSD. I nearly tossed it through the window. Ugh.
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May 19, 2015 21:38
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Lysdexique posted:I work for a pretty big tech support company here that manages multiple clients, some big some small, and they're starting to do a process called Cross training and it's really annoying the crap out of me. Basically they aim to merge every single team on our floor so that everybody is trained for pretty much all our clients. Which is a lot. A lot of clients. Ran into something like this when I worked healthcare IT. I was on helldesk and we had 5 people for the 1st shift, 2 for the second and 2 for the 3rd. We had 19,000 employees, and any time there was a minor problem we'd have calls 100 deep with a 90 minute wait time. The lovely thing was the nurses would be more than happy to kick back, put their feet up and listen to the hold music, then bitch at us about the hold time. The answer from management was to cross-train all the field support, data center, and helpdesk personnel and completely destroy anything resembling a regular work schedule. We had people working helpdesk 1st shift one day, data center 2nd shift the next, and field support 3rd shift after that, with 2 days off, then 3rd shift helpdesk followed by 1st shift field support. Management didn't quite understand the reason for why people would be upset by this, since they're getting the opportunity to learn something new and advance their skillset after all. This all went down my last week there, and after 1 month they'd already killed the cross-training because they didn't have enough people left to man all the shifts (since 50% of the personnel had quit). Of course the IT manager got her coveted promotion to VP and a seat at the big table, so who the gently caress cared if IT was in shambles and morale was in the shitter? The best part was when one of our team members asked the IT manager right at the beginning if she'd like to work her schedule, and the IT manager got offended and replied "I'm management - I don't do shift work." Aunt Beth posted:Were you in Rochester or elsewhere? I was located at the Commercial Ink Jet facility in Kettering, OH - wasn't a bad gig up until they blew a million dollars on special cases for the salespeople's iPhones and iPads because Kodak was locked in a patent dispute with Apple and didn't want to have anyone see them associated with an Apple product. All I wanted was $2/hr more after having been there for almost 2 years with no raise and losing 2 of our desktop support guys and me left holding the bag as the last man standing. They laughed, I left. I was making $10k more a year at the new job, although it was healthcare IT, so that might be a wash. It did, however, lead to my current place of employment. dissss posted:It's also amazing how jealous people get when someone else's laptop gets replaced and theirs doesn't. Doesn't matter their old one is still in warranty and working fine and the ones actually being replaced are more than a year older. We actually had some people who were pissed that we were taking away their old machines. In one case a guy refused the upgrade even after repeated threats that we were no longer going to fix his 10 year old laptop, and that if it broke he could use a pen and paper. He reluctantly agreed to the upgrade, then refused to give up his old laptop a week after we gave him his new laptop. IT VP finally got involved and told him to either give up the old laptop or return the new one (policy was you could have a laptop or a desktop, or a laptop and a desktop, but not two laptops). He returned the new one. A week later his old laptop died, and when he came to ask for help the site lead laughed at him and threw him a notepad and pencil. They fired the guy the next day after he blew up at the facility manager over it. Oddly enough, resistance to the chore of transferring all their poo poo over to a new laptop died overnight and people welcomed me with smiles and the occasional wince whenever I came up and told them they were getting new equipment.
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May 19, 2015 22:11
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 New client walkthrough today, one of the guys on-site took a look at a user's workstation that was having issues with Outlook running slow. They have a 2010 Exchange server on premise, too.
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May 19, 2015 22:17
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Well, sure, but at the same time if you really think you need 47.5gb worth of emails you can get them the hell off my Exchange server.
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May 19, 2015 22:32
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sfwarlock posted:I feel like "ticket came in" is more anecdotes like 'hey, today I had a user who put a bunch of poo poo in /etc/hosts' and this thread is for daily poo poo like "jesus christ windows updates, stop randomly rebooting computers every time I turn around." But people post poo poo that generally annoys them in the ticket thread and anecdotal ticket related stuff in poo poo that pisses me off, so it's just two threads with the same crap. I don't care that much, I'll read three threads or I'll read one fast-moving thread, but that argument doesn't hold water.
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May 19, 2015 22:34
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Wibla posted:poo poo pissing me off: ticket thread talk. I think 1 thread moves at the same speed as all 3 at once.
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May 19, 2015 22:38
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Sickening posted:I think 1 thread moves at the same speed as all 3 at once.
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May 19, 2015 22:40
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:If anything, 1 thread might slow the 3 down, make them a lot more readable, eliminate some noise. For example, this talk of combining the threads would look awfully silly in a combined thread.
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May 19, 2015 22:50
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Erwin posted:
I like having 3 threads because I get 3x the dopamine from the new post notifications.
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May 19, 2015 23:59
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Gyshall posted:
I had someone call in with a corrupted 55gb PST file. He didn't know why it got corrupted. edit: I think he had emails as late as 2007 in there.
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May 20, 2015 00:07
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| # ? May 17, 2024 02:44 |
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IT related but not necessarily work. How is it that software is getting worse? Isn't it supposed to get better? WIndows 7 was the best OS ever, why make it worse with 8 and 10? I might be alone but Server 2008 R2 was amazing, why change to that lovely 2012 UI? Why was Firefox the perfect browser in 2006 but when I choose a browser in 2015 I'm just picking the one that annoys me the least?
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May 20, 2015 00:15
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