| > Sysadmins develop strategies for reducing the number of requests at any cost, usually by making the experience as opaque and unhelpful as possible. This is sometimes an organizational problem. I worked in a support role at VMware for about 5 years and this is what I observed: - Support & IT departments typically have enough staff in the beginning - The organization grows & the department grows to match the new work that exists - At a certain point, the organizational view of Support & IT/Ops changes, and it's now viewed as a cost that you want to keep down. - Leaders try to minimize the increases in budget, but the workload per sysadmin/engineer increases. - The sysadmins/engineers have no control over the flow of new work, which effects the quality of work that gets done and can create a toxic environment. It literally becomes impossible to handle all the incoming requests. Different people handle it differently. Good sysadmins would learn to prioritize properly, but due to the toxicity some people have trouble handling it so they end up developing strategies to make a certain number of requests "go away". Anyway- just my two cents. |
1) Leadership: Stop viewing the IT/Ops/Support department as a "cost to keep down".
2) Leadership: Treat the department like they are manned by people.
3) Realize that not all requests are created equal. Some take minutes, some take months.
4) Determine a reasonable number of requests/tickets per sysadmin/engineer. Make sure to add padding for things like project work, sick time, vacation, professional development, and so on.
5) Hire proactively to prevent the determined threshold above from being surpassed.
6) From the IT/Ops departments perspective: realize that the incoming requests are coming from people that need your help and they are effectively your clients/customers. Treat them as if customer satisfaction is extremely important!
There are also other strategies where you give a subset of people the ability to work on projects and designate a different subset to be interupted with urgent requests, and rotate the role. There are all kinds of things you can do to improve the situation :)