| The SOLUTION to this problem is multifold: 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 :) |