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AreWeDrunkYet posted:1 every 15 minutes? If you have well defined processes and clear KBs, the problem should be solved or escalated by then. More likely, ~lol~. What happens when an application fights you for literally half the day in some trial and error whack a mole death match.
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May 26, 2016 06:42
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skooma512 posted:What happens when an application fights you for literally half the day in some trial and error whack a mole death match. 
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May 26, 2016 06:58
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Pretty sure that's just called Wednesday.
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May 26, 2016 07:01
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skooma512 posted:What happens when an application fights you for literally half the day in some trial and error whack a mole death match. Solved OR ESCALATED. Half a day of a new tech playing whack a mole is two seconds for me to say "oh it SAYS ssl connection failed but it really means it failed GSSAPI negotiation because that server changed authentication backends" and then tell them to do a Kinit to a different realm or whatever. T1 spending a long time on a ticket should be an exception, not a rule. It's worse for everyone: the tech will be frustrated when fix after fix fails and even more so when the T2 or T3 makes it look easy because of their larger knowledge base; the user will have a ton of time wasted for no reason; and the T3 might have to work harder to undo whatever changes the T1 did trying to diagnose it. I'm not trying to say "stick to the script like a good little monkey", there's nothing wrong with T1 applying their knowledge and some googling and testing a couple things, but if there's no resolution in sight, kick it up the escalation chain. That's why the stratification exists: to solve problems efficiently.
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May 26, 2016 07:46
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LochNessMonster posted:Don't ever go to HR unless it's sexual harrasment. This has been my mantra up to this point. I wouldn't go to bitch about the situation, I would just go and ask them what the hell happened to the 2% "raise" that everyone was supposed to get. HR handles payroll so it's a legit question.
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May 26, 2016 13:42
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go3 posted:This is true but the world is now full of MBAs and efficiency experts who think that 30% spare is fat that needs to be trimmed. Any MBA or "efficiency expert" that things that 30% spare capacity is fat is an idiot - and I have demonstrated this time and time again in my journeys. And don't even get me started on "Lean/Kaizen."
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May 26, 2016 14:04
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Arsten posted:Any MBA or "efficiency expert" that things that 30% spare capacity is fat is an idiot - and I have demonstrated this time and time again in my journeys. Isn't Kaizen the solution in The Phoenix Project?
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May 26, 2016 14:15
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:
This kills me. We're completely backlogged with tickets and a lot of unimportant "I need a printer moved" tickets get overlooked. As a result, management has mandated that we provide an update daily on important tickets, and less often on stupid poo poo. The problem with that is, I've got 100 open tickets and our helpdesk is slow as poo poo. If I spend 1 minute a day on each ticket trying to give an update of "no update" then I've lost drat near 2 hours of my day for no reason. When I DO update all my tickets, I get questioned on why I'm not "being more efficient" with my time.  (he says as he wastes time perusing internet forums)
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May 26, 2016 14:31
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Colonial Air Force posted:Isn't Kaizen the solution in The Phoenix Project? I haven't read that particular company-help book, but it wouldn't surprise me. The problem with Kaizen and Lean is that after the initial stages, after the person who sets the program up leaves, the process drives each team towards absolute efficiency....at the cost of efficiency elsewhere in the company because at the team level, there is often little understanding of abstract things like "how HR is required by law to do several functions" or even attention to the fact that they shouldn't infringe on those processes they don't understand. This creates a highly politicized environment which almost always has upper management giving deference to the perceived source of revenue in the company. They are run efficiently, the rest of the company slides backwards in efficiency. I have seen this happen at multiple companies and have had to clean up the results at a few of them. The places it succeeds fall into three categories: * The company has an iron fist who approves all changes after evaluating the effect on the whole company. * The company has a unique mix of personalities that mesh and cooperate together. This is the most fragile as people eventually move on and creating gaps in the cultural mesh that aren't filled by their successors. * The company has an almost fanatical and/or cultish belief in the company/president/argent energy collector that drives the process forward like their souls depend on it. In addition, kaizen encourages management to cut people, because The Process will "take care" of the efficiency loss by dropping anything inefficient in having "extra" people. This is often done without consulting the team for their input. Negativity caused by these actions are rarely taken as a fault of the terminating manager(s) - it's a failure of the team to apply The Process. Ultimately, this slowly drives to the point that you are overtaxing your employees and gets rid of the 30% unloaded time, which destroys your efficiency and raises costs in so many ways. The easiest to see is the loss of decompression time. Employees need to be able to take a step back from their standard duties, get a coffee/artisanal water, and bitch about the crap they are dealing with while still remaining in the flow of the business. Why? Because if they are overloaded at work and go home, they drop the mental compartment of work - including stresses - and move to the mental compartment for home. All of the work stresses are still in there waiting to be opened and aren't relaxed away, even if they take a bubble bath (or whatever). The next day, they switch back to the compartment for work and the stress instantly comes back. During a crunch or a cover session, this is usually fine as long as they can return to normalcy at some point within a month. If it lasts longer than a month, they start cutting corners, skipping "less important" work, or skipping work that they consider burdensome. The lesser tracked issues include increased turnover (training and onboarding costs a lot of money that many companies don't even realize). Additionally, side tinkering and projects all but die under kaizen. Upper Management never understands the value of their employees' experimentation. Employees tinkering on the side fix problems, find low-cost automation solutions, and increase productivity by modifying a workflow (as a whole, although there are always dead weights in every company). This increases engagement and betters the company if those ideas can be demonstrated and then spread as part of a process update. I can go on and on about the downsides.
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May 26, 2016 15:31
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That's basically the opposite of the point The Phoenix Project makes. It's literally a retelling of the book "The Goal", just set in IT instead of manufacturing. The focus of which is the Theory of Constraints. This is the principle that any optimization that does not target the main bottleneck in the system is pointless, because it just means work piles up even faster at the bottleneck. So if you're making shortsighted changes within your department that globally make delivery slower, you're loving it up. You're encouraged to look at the service you're delivering holistically, exactly as you said. It's a pretty good book.
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May 26, 2016 16:29
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So yesterday I hear about how it's so great that my team manages to be fantastic with a 1:125 ratio of staff to end users. And I agree, it's pretty fantastic, but we're busy and everyone works hard. But sadly, that same "very thin staffing" concept applies to the rest of IT as well, so we're grossly understaffed in all of our other positions. The solution? Start training up some of the desktop team to do a lot of the day to day admin work, because PROJECTS PROJECTS PROJECTS are more important. Except: 1> We all have full time jobs already with the current(escalating) workload. When do you expect us to perform these addtional tasks? 2> When you start training people in how to admin other systems, like Exchange, Cisco phones, etc, then they go do that work for someone else for more money, because duh. Really sick of the bullshit here. JUST HIRE SOME MORE loving PEOPLE. Running an IT staff that is literally less than half the size as is typical for this company and expecting to run a project portfolio that is as thick as a small town phone book does not loving work.
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May 26, 2016 16:36
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AlternateAccount posted:So yesterday I hear about how it's so great that my team manages to be fantastic with a 1:125 ratio of staff to end users. And I agree, it's pretty fantastic, but we're busy and everyone works hard. I think training helpdesk people to do admin tasks is smart. Keeping helpdesk people doing helpdesk stuff because you fear they might go somewhere else is pretty dumb.
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May 26, 2016 16:39
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Docjowles posted:That's basically the opposite of the point The Phoenix Project makes. It's literally a retelling of the book "The Goal", just set in IT instead of manufacturing. The focus of which is the Theory of Constraints. This is the principle that any optimization that does not target the main bottleneck in the system is pointless, because it just means work piles up even faster at the bottleneck. So if you're making shortsighted changes within your department that globally make delivery slower, you're loving it up. You're encouraged to look at the service you're delivering holistically, exactly as you said. It's a pretty good book. That's the opposite of Lean, then. But I've read at least a dozen books on lean. The last one, recommended by a manager that wanted to implement it, got 30 or 35 pages of notes on my kindle account about various ways in which it was wrong.
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May 26, 2016 16:40
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That brewery project from last year has finally born fruit, but like most things that gestate for a really long time it produced a really big baby: A plan for a 1M square foot brewery!  The good news: About 90% of the lovely old equipment I've been trying to replace for a year will just be part of demolition so who gives a poo poo. The bad news: 1. I have to work with the demo team to make sure they don't destroy any of the infrastructure for the site monitoring and surveillance which needs to keep running through construction. 2. The waste water treatment plant still has not been upgraded per my recommendations and can't handle a million goddamn square foot brewery's output. If you've never worked with waste water the city, county and state are all over it. Just the rain runoff from such a large property is enough to entail treatment and monitoring lest we get three levels of government suing the poo poo out of us. Construction will add to it, but the brewery will probably put out two barrels of waste water for each barrel of beer and can probably generate a million barrels of beer per year. That's an utter shitload of waste water. I was hoping we would sell that land to the brewery and I could wash my hands of the place but we're leasing it so we still retain rights to develop the remaining empty space. It's a huge property so there's actually plenty of room left over even after plonking a giant brewery down, Sim City style. I'll continue to work with the site manager and tiny engineering team, and I expect my boss and the CEO will continue to ignore our requests until they're compelled to do otherwise. The wastewater thing is going to be a big goddamn problem if they don't get their poo poo together within the next 6-8 months. With the incredible gridlock we have here that time will go by in a flash.
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May 26, 2016 16:49
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Dick Trauma posted:That brewery project from last year has finally born fruit, but like most things that gestate for a really long time it produced a really big baby: A plan for a 1M square foot brewery! One meter square feet? That's incredibly tiny. Edit: Wait. I'm dumb. Ignore that.
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May 26, 2016 16:58
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Sickening posted:I think training helpdesk people to do admin tasks is smart. Keeping helpdesk people doing helpdesk stuff because you fear they might go somewhere else is pretty dumb. I agree with you, but the degree to which they want to hand off is higher than the simple things. If it IS just the simple things, the five hours a week it will save someone is not enough to make a tangible difference. And it's one thing to say hey, you guys provision/deprovision all phones and another thing to say hey, all phone tickets go to you guys. Or for example when we didn't have a FT Sharepoint person the solution was going to be to send a guy to Sharepoint training and have them do it on top of their normal duties without any increase in pay. Well then... that person is a Sharepoint admin who's doing desktop work only for as long as it takes for them to find a job where they don't have to anymore. You know? It's not like my guys are languishing, there's available training and certs and such. This is more because we're just understaffed in general and doing way too many things. My team is efficient and effective, so welp, let's dump some work on those guys who are already busy under the excuse that the day to day stuff is what's killing project deadlines. Spoiler: it isn't.
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May 26, 2016 17:05
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AlternateAccount posted:Really sick of the bullshit here. JUST HIRE SOME MORE loving PEOPLE. Running an IT staff that is literally less than half the size as is typical for this company and expecting to run a project portfolio that is as thick as a small town phone book does not loving work. Ask me about having 8 people at all tiers of help desk for a company of nearly 2000. And then ask me about getting cut along with two others. The interim IT director that made that decision was out of the door less than 2 months later. I need to find someone to gossip with to see why.
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May 26, 2016 17:08
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AlternateAccount posted:So yesterday I hear about how it's so great that my team manages to be fantastic with a 1:125 ratio of staff to end users. And I agree, it's pretty fantastic, but we're busy and everyone works hard. That sounds kinda like my work. We have about the same ratio, and that's not even including students. The college keeps expecting us to provide all the same level of service as other post secondary schools in the province, but refuses to let us hire more people to match those other IT departments. The difference is we have the summer downtime to train people. For instance I started on the help desk for my first year, got moved to desktop support for my second, and now I'm setting up a WDS share to replace our old Altiris and making our default Windows 10 image because no one else has time for those projects. They're even looking at getting me app-v or VMware training this summer.
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May 26, 2016 17:27
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22 Eargesplitten posted:Ask me about having 8 people at all tiers of help desk for a company of nearly 2000. And then ask me about getting cut along with two others. The interim IT director that made that decision was out of the door less than 2 months later. I need to find someone to gossip with to see why. Well there was a vague threatening comment about how if we don't get projects in line and on time, it would be somehow bad. Uhhh... there's no lack of expertise. There's no lack of effort. The problem is, and always has been, way too much work for not enough people. Are we going to start firing people for not meeting bullshit deadlines? Hungry Computer posted:That sounds kinda like my work. We have about the same ratio, and that's not even including students. The college keeps expecting us to provide all the same level of service as other post secondary schools in the province, but refuses to let us hire more people to match those other IT departments. The difference is we have the summer downtime to train people. OK, you win. I don't get why hiring some more staff is such a nightmare for a company that blows money everywhere else without regard. It's not as if there aren't tons of studies that show we're running at about 50% of what is typical for a company in this sector of this size. I am fine with career pathing people up. This place doesn't seem to get that unless you MAKE THE PATH and have a plan for it, you're going to career path people right out the door. I would love to spend the time and money getting one of my guys to get his VCP or something and then creating an admin role for him to back up our current guy, with a new title/pay, etc. That's great, I support it 100%. But you have to be willing to give them the position, pay what the market value of the position is, and be proactively backfilling their spot. If you're not willing to give them the money for it and don't have a plan in place for them, someone else will. It shouldn't be this difficult.
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May 26, 2016 17:45
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Arsten posted:One meter square feet? That's incredibly tiny.
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May 26, 2016 18:06
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anthonypants posted:Just imagine having to fill those shoes. Oh, that's easy. First, start with a bag of portland cement.....
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May 26, 2016 18:22
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If it was a square meter brewery they could put it in my office. Not like there's a desk to get in the way! Last week my boss stopped by and asked if I had batteries for her mouse. I looked around and said "Let me check in my... drawer..." and of course I have no drawer because I have no desk but she didn't get the joke. I have no cabinets either so unless she thought I was keistering a supply of AAs I don't know where the hell she thought I'd be keeping them.
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May 26, 2016 18:26
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Dick Trauma posted:If it was a square meter brewery they could put it in my office. Not like there's a desk to get in the way! Well, depending what part of the English world you hail from, "drawer(s)" could mean undergarments. She probably just thought you were hitting on her.
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May 26, 2016 18:28
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Do any of you have any experience with QuickBase? We're using it right now but looking to get away from it because $$$. My first thought was to pitch FileMaker as a replacement but I figured I'd see if anyone here knew of a better alternative.
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May 26, 2016 18:53
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I implemented quickbase at a previous job with secure LDAP authentication. Pretty slick product for what it is, but yeah, hilariously pricey even for SaaS platforms. I took our backup tape inventory tracking spreadsheet and turned it into a beautiful web app for when we cycled tapes out of the loader, taking what was a god awful process for swapping tapes and updating the inventory and cutting the time in half with a barcode scanner.
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May 26, 2016 19:06
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:You guys are like a conveyor belt that's running at 95% capacity. Any unexpected work throws it above 100% which creates backlog, which creates compounding problems as you work to keep up with the conveyor belt AND manage the backlog.
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May 26, 2016 19:40
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Arsten posted:I haven't read that particular company-help book, but it wouldn't surprise me. What are the upsides? How did Kazien become so popular?
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May 26, 2016 20:08
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Tab8715 posted:What are the upsides? How did Kazien become so popular? If I recall correctly, all of this stuff was originally made for actual factory lines, where it makes much more sense to get everything up to 100% use/efficiency and get rid of anything that slows that down. Then somebody was like "PEOPLE ARE LIKE MACHINES THIS WILL TOTALLY WORK!" and here we are.
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May 26, 2016 20:20
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Inspector_666 posted:If I recall correctly, all of this stuff was originally made for actual factory lines, where it makes much more sense to get everything up to 100% use/efficiency and get rid of anything that slows that down.
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May 26, 2016 20:30
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vibur posted:Do any of you have any experience with QuickBase? Quite expensive and very limited on fields per form. I built a lot of stuff with it at the Tony place, even a timecard system but I kept having to find ways around the limitations. Filemaker would've been soooooo much easier and cheaper, and I wouldn't have had to deal with browser bullshit.
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May 26, 2016 20:54
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Dick Trauma posted:Quite expensive and very limited on fields per form. I built a lot of stuff with it at the Tony place, even a timecard system but I kept having to find ways around the limitations. Filemaker would've been soooooo much easier and cheaper, and I wouldn't have had to deal with browser bullshit. Google is pointing me to TeamDesk, Zoho Creator, and Bitrix (really?).
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May 26, 2016 21:17
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teamdest posted:I'm not trying to say "stick to the script like a good little monkey", there's nothing wrong with T1 applying their knowledge and some googling and testing a couple things, but if there's no resolution in sight, kick it up the escalation chain. That's why the stratification exists: to solve problems efficiently.
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May 26, 2016 21:28
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Tab8715 posted:What are the upsides? How did Kazien become so popular? Kaizen is the Toyota Way. They pushed it so hard post-WWII that they eventually started paying for their suppliers to adopt it. Toyota executives that designed 'the way' then began showing it to everyone (for a fee, of course) and, to their credit, it worked very well for manufacturing companies in certain situations (there are many situations, even within Toyota's own group of companies, where it fails - like the Toyota venture into China that was almost broke a few years ago and decided to abandon the Toyota Way). Then, as Inspector_666 notes: Inspector_666 posted:If I recall correctly, all of this stuff was originally made for actual factory lines, where it makes much more sense to get everything up to 100% use/efficiency and get rid of anything that slows that down. America decided, in their race to be like the Japanese in the 80s, that they could do this, too! After a few high profile successes on companies that hadn't changed since the 1950s or 60s, "Lean Experts" cropped up absolutely everywhere and started to sell the hell out of their services, promising the moon. The early 80s obsession with this was a contributing factor to having a lot of dysfunctional companies that the next big financial wave rode on: Buying up companies and selling the parts for more than they paid to buy the firm. I've talked to these consultants on more than one occasion. Each tells you a different way to achieve "lean" (they know the TRUE way! They sat in a one-day seminar they half-slept through that just completely opened their eyes to waste!  ) But the drive in the last 20 years has been like I666 noted: Human Resources? Well, that's just an assembly line of paper work! Project Management? Assembly line! EMTs saving a life? Assembly line! It doesn't matter what the process is, if you can generalize it to a flow chart, you can find a way to squeeze six cents per incident out of it at the expense of logic, employees, and/or sanity. They often say to take a holistic look at the organization, but they disregard entire segments of a company that will save money to concentrate on process and form.Worse, if you start reading books on Lean, many of them are treatises on basic project management skills. Like "If you see that you can eliminate a step, bring it up and go through the new process steps!" and if that doesn't work because the culture isn't used to operating that way, change the culture! They often act like changing a culture is easy - which it can be if you are the President or CEO and are driven and give results to the employee base....but very very few companies have that sort of executive engagement. And any books you read all have different ways to go lean, too. I've even read a book that encourages you to sabotage your company and then lead it to the shining waters of Lean, because that's completely acceptable and not underhanded at all. (That same book said to tell your employees that no one will be terminated but later on in the book straight up tells you to fire half of your employees immediately, before beginning the lean process changes are to begin, including tell them that there won't be any terminations - because management has so much credibility at this point, right? I can only assume they separate those two agenda items on the company-wide meeting with a United Way update. It also goes on to tell you to politically sabotage rivals of the process in the company so they are fired to allow the process to blossom. Some of these guys are idealists at the pants-on-head-retarded level and outright ridiculous.)
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May 26, 2016 22:00
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Part of the problem is that even if you have a good theory, awful managers will turn it into a nightmare. In one of these threads, someone had a story about having three hour long stand-up meetings.
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May 26, 2016 22:46
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vibur posted:Well, we do still need to deal with browser bullshit because some portion of this has to be available online which is awesome 'cause we're HIPAA-regulated. FIlemaker has had a web offering for a really long time now. I imagine it's much better implemented than Quickbase or something really lovely like a Zoho product.
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May 26, 2016 22:51
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Just got Slack today. So that brings me to email, company provided cell phone, automated text message for outages when on call, Opsgenie, Lync, and now Slack. I think we've reached critical mass. You can find me, I get it, I think we're done, sheesh.
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May 27, 2016 02:40
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:Just got Slack today. So that brings me to email, company provided cell phone, automated text message for outages when on call, Opsgenie, Lync, and now Slack. Lync already has the basic functionality of slack with persistent chat rooms.... just why?
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May 27, 2016 03:51
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DigitalMocking posted:Lync already has the basic functionality of slack with persistent chat rooms.... just why? Slack can be extended into a shitload of other stuff, I would dump Lync for it in this situation.
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May 27, 2016 03:53
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Inspector_666 posted:Slack can be extended into a shitload of other stuff, I would dump Lync for it in this situation. I agree. I just requested we get a year of slack because we still haven't implemented lync or skype or whatever and gently caress that poo poo.
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May 27, 2016 03:54
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Inspector_666 posted:Slack can be extended into a shitload of other stuff, I would dump Lync for it in this situation. Depends on what you're using lync for. If lync is just IM and chat, yeah. If you're using it to host conferences and do your voice, you're kind of stuck with that piece of poo poo. NOTE: I am stuck with that piece of poo poo, and someone tried to add Slack about 2 months ago and I told them to get hosed.
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May 27, 2016 03:56
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