How to Make Time for the Fun Stuff
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, says the old proverb. To interpret that for the world of IT technical workgroups, all work and no play is an illusion – the trick is not to allow your Read More …
Category: People
IT support management as it pertains to human relationships with staff, customers, and suppliers
The Problem with the ‘Nice’ Manager
It’s nice to be seen as nice. Nice means an easier ride, less friction, no conflict, broad acceptance. But then, even niceness is not always easy, because others may not always be nice to you. And then there’s the question Read More …
IT Management – How to Make Your Staff Want to Work for You
It’s not easy being the leader of a technical workgroup. It’s even harder if you came up through the technical route yourself, so you know you’ve got to let all that technical stuff go. That has to happen to give Read More …
How to Know Your Users from Your Customers
This article is about how to know your IT support users from your customers. It’s about thinking clearly, so as not to confuse marketing-speak with service design realities. “Oh, we don’t call them ‘users’ anymore,” the Service Desk supervisor said Read More …
Tech Staff Motivation – Forget What You Think You Know
Good grief, there is some real naïve nonsense talked about motivating staff, there really is. I’ve recently read yet another happy-clappy article making some spectacularly preposterous claims about staff motivation. It upset me, as so much of this trite, theoretical, Read More …
IT’S Management Jim, but…
In the esoteric world of IT Service Management, that word ‘management’ is bandied around with such commonality that sometimes, it is misused and its meaning is blurred; technicians are not managers, and processes do not need management. The word ‘management’ Read More …
IT Support Staff Productivity – the Management Magic Bullet?
Some years ago,one of the more enlightened UK Servicedesk tool vendors and I partnered to build a framework with IT support staff productivity at its core. It did not go as planned. I had designed the framework for measuring the Read More …
5 Reasons for Slow IT Support
Slow IT Support is everywhere. It doesn’t have to be that way, but it often is, with fixes taking days when they should take minutes.There are several reasons for this; in my experience, these are five of the most common. Read More …
Managing Mixed Workloads with the RMAP Quadrant
The RMAP™ Quadrant is a tool for anticipating and managing mixed workloads. In a department providing both on-demand and scheduled output, staff resources must be committed to the entire workload, not just the noisiest, reactive element of it. Although RMAP Read More …