Dmitry Labanov в LinkedIn: С большим интересом слежу за каналом Тихона Смирнова, который о себе пишет… (2024)

Topic 10.2 Continued on conflict situations.Having worked in technical support and further in technical support management, I have the following principles:1. If an angry employee storms in, you should listen to him quietly and attentively. The employee is in a vulnerable state and should never be presented with any counterarguments. 2. Any counterargument in the style of "have you contacted support with this issue before?" or "why did you put up with it for a month when you could have contacted technical support right away" is nothing more than an excuse to have your throat cut right here and now.3. We solve the "problem" first. If it can be solved here and now, then we solve it here and now. If there is no immediate solution, then we agree with the employee that their issue is under constant review and the employee will be notified of each next step and the timing of the solution. If the problem has no solution, then either immediately or after working through the problem, the user is offered alternatives from which he will choose the best option. 4. After receiving the result, when the user is satisfied, it is necessary to be sure to say that a month of patience and nerves are not a prerequisite for solving the problem. It is enough to immediately report the problem and then a solution will be promptly provided. The main thing that is said is when the user is satisfied and relaxed and what you say is really true and you are really ready to solve the problem promptly.But that's my experience in for-profit organizations, and it's no easier with schools. Staff may be afraid of being intrusive/toxic, or demotivated by previous experiences with IT. And these employees just suffer quietly with their problems. We use the following methods to identify and help these employees:1. Regular (for example, in the first week after the next vacation) digests-newsletters to all school employees, where in a short, light form IT tells what feats were accomplished during the past period. If you write in an impersonal form that some problems of the staff, which lasted for years, were solved, it may become a trigger for silent employees to ask for help.2. Take the time to communicate with employees at the time of long and routine procedures (e.g., application version updates). To fill an awkward pause you can ask what problems are arising. Sure, you may get a long list of problems, but some of the "unsolvable" problems will be solvable in 5 minutes. Some will take a little longer. Some of the solved problems will be applicable to other employees. We sometimes do a mailing with the most interesting cases in the hope that someone else also has the same difficulty and will either use the recovery instructions themselves or contact us in IT.

Topic 10.1 Conflict situations. My experience in observing IT's relationship with users in international schools is that it is not pure conflict. In commercial organizations where I worked, if a user is maximally furious with the work of some IT service (device or application), he/she breaks into the technical support or IT manager and with the use of shouting and profanity (no jokes and exaggerations, welcome to the Russian commercial organization with rare exceptions) tells how he/she is tired of torment, that this torment lasts for a month or 2 months. At the same time, the employee has never once told anyone that he/she has such a problem, he/she just quietly agonized, and then the employee's patience ran out. In international schools with an extremely high level of loyalty, employees most often go into the mode of resignation - "well, if it works this way, it's just the way it is, it's fate". To be honest, working in both situations, I don't even know who is easier to fight with. If in the first case an employee will at least come and yell and IT will know that there is such a problem, then in the second case you have to come up with very extravagant ways to sway employees to share problems with IT. How did I learn to work with this?

Prepared two more topics. One more is in the general thought stage. I first write down each topical in a continuous stream of thoughts, then sequence it, then reduce the text to a reasonable size so that the reader:1. Not get bored2. Not get confused3. Did not forget by the end of the topic what was written about in the beginning.Next two-part topic on conflicts with IT

There is absolutely no time at all to formalize a few more thoughts on IT activities in general and IT in international schools in particular. Just an outline so far. First of all, the material is for international school leaders who doubt that it is possible and necessary to have an understanding of basic IT processes in order to make more informed decisions. Stay tuned!

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Topic 9.2. Option one - I wrote earlier that 80% of automation success consists of formalized (documented) processes. Show potential providers 2-3 basic processes, ask them to replicate them in their systems. If the logic doesn't match, they won't completely rework the logic for you. You'll quickly realize that migration/implementation won't happen easily. If the process fits their logic completely or with minor tweaks, they are candidates for partnership.The second option - you really like some product, it has a lot of options, plush interface and you are fully ready to rebuild your processes under the ready logic of the system. This option is allowed, I have tested this option myself. Sometimes there are phantom pains of old processes, but it is a common thing.The third option (hardcore, better not to use it) is "I want this system, but I want my own processes in it". I already wrote in the 9.1 topic that this will lead to system collapse sooner or later. When choosing this option, you should keep in mind the following:1. whether you will use existing features and logic or want to implement your own - you will pay for already implemented features and pay for all your improvements.2. Even if you put your best employee in charge of each process, who performs this process every day, this employee will definitely forget several important (and maybe even key) nuances in the terms of reference. Simply because for many years this employee performs the work on automatic, without thinking. No one will redo it for free, you will waste time and money again (I once wrote a technical task from the words of employees, gave them to read, they confirmed that everything is correct, and then when testing they remembered the nuances. And so on 3 times. On the one hand, they are not on purpose, on the other hand - they are not paying their own money). 3. The employee will also be distracted from their regular job in favor of development and is unlikely to be happy and motivated (and after all, they are your best employee).4. Even if by some miracle the developers have accomplished what you asked for and the result matches, there may always be a need for either another rework or a "small" adjustment later on. That small adjustment may require redoing the entire process that was done for insane amounts of money. Simply because you have to write the logic from scratch. And the system itself isn't bad, it's just that it was written for other processes.The list goes on, but I hope that these theses will help at least make the first step towards the right solution.

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Topic 9.1. How do I choose a system (using School/Student Information System (SIS) as an example)?There are thousands of them - PowerSchool, iSams, Veracross, Blackbaud, PASS, a day is not enough time to list them all. If you google the ratings, you will see incomprehensible resources with incomprehensible analytics and incomprehensible conclusions. Although, of course, it is clear who paid for these analytics and conclusions. But what should the school do? What system to implement or what system to upgrade from the current "bad" system?If you get a good sales manager, he/she will honestly tell you that in their SIS you can realize all your dreams and fantasies. And he'd/she'd be right. His/her problem is to sign the contract. Who and how will realize your dreams and fantasies is not his/her problem, but the problem of project managers and developers. Well, it's your problem too... will be soon....The main points to understand are:1. You already have some business processes in place. How the processes are implemented (on paper or in an old system, whether they are optimal or not) is the tenth question. The processes are there and everyone is used to them, they are used every day2. These business processes are already programmed in the system you are buying. Exactly the same or diametrically opposite, but a large team of developers worked on their development and this work is sold to you, but with the possibility of making "any" changes for an additional fee.The devil lies in the "flexibility of the system that can be completely customized to your needs". In fact, it will either be insanely expensive and time-consuming, or you will run into architectural limitations of the system (sooner or later). And then that's it, it's the end stop, the train doesn't go any further.If you think that your processes are optimal and convenient, then you need a system where the logic is implemented as close to yours as possible. How to check it?

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Topic 8.2. Continuing on about the benefits of the Helpdesk serviceFor teachers/staff these are:1. The teacher/staff doesn't have to think about who in IT to contact about what issue - there is a single address for all requests.2. If the responsible IT employee is sick/on vacation and another IT employee replaces him/her, it doesn't matter for the teacher/staff, the address for the requester is the same, the IT staff will figure out who will handle the request.3. If Helpdesk is set up correctly (all services from the IT Service Catalog, priorities, deadlines and notifications are defined), the requester sees through notifications that his ticket is taken into work, is not lost and meets the deadline.4. In case of incorrect/untimely work on tickets, the whole history of interaction between the requester and IT is stored in the history of the ticket/tickets - a request for the same reason for the millionth time (the problem is not fixed), the ticket was not taken into work in time, all correspondence on the ticket is stored in the ticket, there is no need to search for emails or correspondence in chats.For IT employees:1. Do not promise to fix something or give advice and then forget because you were distracted by another task.2. analyze types of requests by service, find patterns of which service tickets are registered most often, so that you can then work out a solution and fix the problem once and for all (this is already Problem Management)3. Constructive dialog with investors and management in case of conflict situations (I will also write about such situations) - we opened a ticket/tickets and in the ticket histories we see who wrote what to whom, how quickly the ticket was taken into work, by whom it was taken into work, when it was executed. 4. If you can see from the tickets that they are executed efficiently, but there are a lot of them because there are a lot of teachers/staff and not enough IT specialists, you can provide the school management with a reasonable justification with statistics on the types of requests, time spent daily. Helpdesk, of course, does not guarantee a positive decision to hire an additional staff member, but at least it's some reasonable justification supported by numbers, not the abstract "we can't handle it, there's a lot of people and not enough of us".For school leadership:1. to be able to assess the quality of IT in the school2. to save their time and be objective when dealing with conflict situations3. To make an informed decision on hiring additional IT staff.

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Topic 8.1. The importance of the ticket registration system (Helpdesk) is very underestimated.But with one small caveat - as I wrote earlier, any automation/optimization system is just a tool, not a magic wand. Even if you implement the most fancy and expensive system, it will only log tickets. Helpdesk system does not (unfortunately) cancel the need to turn on your head to solve tickets, and sometimes even lift your body to physically help with some task. If IT employees are not motivated to be systematic in their work (with all the advantages of these systems, there are a lot of reasons - from internal burnout/tiredness to elementary sabotage), Helpdesk tickets will disappear like in a black hole.Any Helpdesk system developer will describe in all colors the endless features of the system, there are systems giants like Atlassin, which allow you to track development tasks, keep track of sprints, link tasks with the knowledge base, with version control systems. Hence the cost. But what does a school with its daily tasks need?A school also sometimes has development, but more often than not, such development can be put into regular tickets and handled in a general way.If the school has finally decided to systematize only IT, the range of systems (including free ones) increases dramatically. Yes, in Helpdesk it is possible to keep tickets not only for IT. If the system supports work with several e-mail addresses (with several queues), it is possible to systematize the work of Facility (to bring in/out/mend furniture, clean the room, make repairs, change a light bulb), Accounting (to issue a certificate, pay slip), Security (to issue a pass for guests). Very convenient and efficient, personally implemented.Basic functions for IT:1. ability to automatically assign executors to certain types of services, 2. the ability to maintain a knowledge base and in tickets to specify links to articles from the knowledge base, when a specialist writes in the last comment how the incident was solved,3. Combine incidents into Problems for further search of the root cause of recurring incidents.Optionally - keep an inventory of hardware, software, subscriptions. Maybe some trivial integrations.After the formation of the IT Service Catalog, it is perhaps the most important task to implement and use such a system (if not already done).School staff and IT staff are more likely to view these systems as abuzz, formalistic, and a waste of valuable time.Why is this a benefit to anyone at all?

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