Handling IT concerns in any company can be a stressful task, and lying at the base of this stress is a simple imbalance between the capability of work that can be done by any given team, and the amount of work that is flowing in at any given time.
It therefore only stands to reason that, unless you can increase your staff to accommodate the work flow while avoiding Parkinson’s Law, the only surefire method to reduce the stress of working in an IT department is to better educate yourself and your staff in the best practices possible.
Sometimes this is a simple change in day to day work, other times an education comes with the realization that an increase in technology is needed. The purpose of this article is to inform well-meaning IT gurus and workers on some common sense techniques and practices that will increase performance without increasing overhead.
Maintaining an even baseline of efficiency over a certain period of time, barring any changes in the end user technology or any necessary IT training, should allow you to create a timeline for standard trouble tickets. Use this information to inform the end user, as this information removes the dreaded waiting game from their minds, and relieves much of the stress from both receiving and responding to complaints regarding the status of their ticket.
Always attempt to follow up a closed ticket with an attempt to gather feedback from the user. The most important forms of feedback should concern not only the ability of the IT responder, but the source of the problem, whether software, hardware, or both, and the strength of the proposed solution. This is where current technology plays its strongest role, as simplifying the source of software by considering a Dell virtualization server that operates through cloud computing can greatly reduce the complexity of software issues.
Each new ticket received should strive to quickly address the issue of the end user. This does not have to be a full assessment, it simply has to inform the user that their issue is being worked on. Addressing new tickets helps by not only informing the user of the timeline for resolution, but it can also be a source of quick fixes for known issues.
A scheduled day, out of either every quarter, or even every month, for an IT staffer to spend their time in another department, can result in a multitude of nagging problems being resolved. This not only reduces the number of tickets being forwarded, it can result in tickets being rescinded, and will improve the image of your IT department within the company.
Everyone lacks in something, and while this can be easily forgotten when helping others with their problems, it must be understood. Failing to empathize with an end user, or worse, giving poor attitude in response to a problem, can often halt the resolution process instead of speeding it along.
5 Ways to Beef Up Your IT Department is a post from: Palaestra Training
