Day One

Today marked the beginning of new chapter in my work life. Today I worked my first full day in the office with my new TL.

The way we work it is that one person (the one on call) comes in early and they person who is not on call comes in 30-60 minutes later. The on call person (the early bird) goes home first (4-4:30 PM), sets up his PC and takes any calls that come in after 5:00 PM. My TL is on call this week and I am the "late guy". I came in at 7:30ish and left at 5:00 PM while my TL came in at 7:00 AM and left at 4:00 PM. It worked out pretty well.

The crux of my new job is this: We get calls from the help desk regarding issues that the customer requests high severity on. We determine whether or not a high severity is warranted and if it is, we change the severity, dispatch the ticket to the proper team, and call them to let them know they have it. We document the ticket with any info that is pertinent and track the ticket until it closes. We also have to update a web site that our customer uses to track priority cases with any new info that the customer needs to know about the issue.

Once the ticket is closed, we have to write a summary that the customer can digest and post it on the web as well. If we were properly staffed, that would be the end of the tasks, but since this region is shorthanded, we also are responsible for the issuing of Problem reports. Part of our contract is that we issue a "problem report ticket" to the team who worked on the issue that includes a template for the team to fill out. In this report, the team has to list what happened, how it was fixed and what can/could/should be done to keep it from recurring. We not only have to issue these to our teams but also third parties that work on cases as well.

Sounds pretty cut and dried, but since I have been training with my TL, I have seen a few of the things that can go wrong. One thing that can and did go wrong (on one of my first cases) is that the customer wouldn't let us close the ticket because she wants assurances that the problem will not occur again. Since our process says we cannot close a ticket until the customer gives us the okay to do so, we have a ticket in pending until we can get either her or her mgr to agree to let us close the case. It has been a week now since the case was solved...it was actually solved the same day as it was opened. The customer has not returned any of our e-mails and her manager has not responded either.

Outside of documenting everything, we also have to know who to dispatch to in case the HD puts the case in the wrong queue (which is frequent). With about a billion queues to sort through, it takes a little getting used to.

So far my biggest problem has been jumping on things before I verify that they are truly high severity cases. I tend to go by what the ticket says instead of calling the end user to verify the accuracy of the ticket. I guess I do not want to let an issue set too long.

Another issue we have been having is with third parties who provide support on the account. While they are held responsible for their support, we "own" I/T and the processes, we get the hit even if it is one of the other companies who blows it. Most of the time the third parties are direct competitors and it makes it difficult to get friendly cooperation.

At 5:00 PM, I forwarded our hotline over to the programmable "follow me" number so my TL could pick up the after hours calls. Once I did that and tested it, I logged off my PC and went home. Since I am not on call, I could enjoy my night off. The freedom is short lived though. Next week I am oncall and I will be called whenever an issue comes up that needs immediate attention. I hope I am ready to fly solo by then.