Wednesday, 7 November 2007

It can be hard work at times

When you work in an organisation where there is a direct split across Notes Support there are always issues which get bounced from team to team because no-one will step up and take ownership of problems. We have a team that is currently split into 3, we have a Notes Support/Day-Day Admin, sitting out in India, here in the UK we have a 3rd line Notes Support team and us Developers.
This does tend to mean that any problem that comes through with anything other than E-mail ( and in many cases those too ) being assigned to our Development group without any kind of investigation. The problem then occurs that once we have the call, trying to pass anything back that goes above, granting access the user is missing etc, is difficult as you have to almost diagnose the problem to the extent of coming up with the solution before they will agree that it needs to be assigned back. The guys in India are capable Notes admins and can do all the standard day-day stuff but are lacking in the confidence to investigate further and also to ask questions, although this is not just limited to the Notes field. Consequently a problem will sit with the Notes Admin team in India for a week or two whilst they do very little to advance the problem, before being assigned back to the 3rd line team who invariably are too busy with other stuff to give the time to fully investigate the problem. This of course leads to frustration for the users who only know that they phoned the IT Helpdesk, who logged the call to the Notes Team to look at.
How can we improve things????
Well first and foremost we have a team that is split across 2 continents and 3 different management chains, yep each team has it's own team leader who answers to another manager who them answers to another manager who then answers to the Global IT Director. Easiest solution to make is surely to bring all three teams under one manager who has some experience of Notes and can therefore cut through the bull-shit argument of "This is a Dev issue/This is an Admin issue", can push jobs directly from one team to another when it's obvious that assistance or extra knowledge is required and can have an overall view of what is going on??
We also need to look at other possible improvements, sharing of knowledge and opening lines of communication. Requests for help should not need to go through management and should be able to be made and actioned at a team level, high priority work withstanding.
In general things have to improve to make Notes a stronger product within our organisation.