Supervision of technical support by management, how do you feel about this?

Question

Helpdesk

Good day!
Interested in your attitude to the control of technical support specialists by management and "senior" system administrators?
And an additional question: if you were a senior system administrator or manager, and saw that technical support does nothing - because everything works (and / or there are no requests from users), how would you react to this? Would they force you to "do something", or would you come up with tasks?

Answer 1

There is always something to do in the office. Well, if the office is of such a size that there are separate employees for technical support. If the duty shift has nothing to do, then you can always involve them to perform some kind of routine. In our office, for example, they are instructed to sort out old cross-connects in the server rooms, search for some equipment that they shoved HZ where, and you need to run through the cabinets and visually find it.
If a person is self-motivated, then he himself will not sit idle, but will go to the admins and start asking them questions on the topic “how does this work and why is it so”, or ask for some simple job that will allow him to learn something new, and even under the control and guidance of senior comrades.

Answer 2

Interested in your attitude to the control of technical support specialists by management and "senior" system administrators?

Sysadmins should not touch technical support. But, on the contrary, it is quite normal: with complex issues, technical support should solve problems through them.

And an additional question: if you were a senior system administrator or manager, and saw that technical support does nothing - because everything works (and / or there are no requests from users), how would you react to this? Would they force you to "do something", or would you come up with tasks?

If most of the time they do nothing, then it is worth reducing the part.

Answer 3

From my own experience (true old - the end of the 90s - the beginning of the 00s), if the management is adequate, then they pay precisely for the fact that everything works. It looked like this for us: you come to the office closer to dinner, look through applications (if any), solve problems. In case of a complex problem, you call the senior administrator, who, outside of emergency situations, appears once a week + remote administration. If there are no applications, you go around the heads of departments and ask how everything works. If there are no complaints again, you go home with a clear conscience.
In another office, for the purpose of optimization, it was decided to pay admins and technical support by the hour. Appeals to the leadership were in vain. Needless to say, after such a decision, everything began to crash and freeze regularly, bases fell off, etc.? Admins and enikei "worked" for 10-12 hours. After two weeks of practically paralyzed work of the office, the management did hear us and returned the fixed rate back.

Answer 4

Does everything really work? Maybe something has been working for a long time only thanks to daily kicks. Or do they not contact technical support because of the futility of this action?

Answer 5

They do not receive money for invented tasks, if there is less work than the people who perform it, it is necessary to reduce the staff. The management should certainly control, calculate KPI, if the ticket is not processed, and the employee watches the films, they should be fined / fired.

Answer 6

In small offices, usually admins and support are one division and often they are not even divided, so the question seems to be about fairly large offices, where admins are one department, support is another. Therefore, admins should not care at all what is happening in the neighboring department. And usually they don’t care until the ticket is escalated to one of the admins.
Support manager? I would check that everything actually works and there are no applications, not because people do not want to write them, but because there is nothing to write about :-)

Answer 7

Management, of course, must control for the same KPI calculation. Appeals are not only a technical plan that works / does not work, but also a consulting one, for which incidents should also be recorded within reason.