How to Manage an Overworked Team There can be many reasons why a team can be over worked, there could an increase in the number of tickets due to recurring issues that have not been mitigated, new projects are starting, insufficient documentation which results in only some team members being able to resolve some issues and the team is understaffed. If there are outstanding root cause and mitigation that needs to be completed, this needs to done ASAP as this is one of the easiest ways to reduce recurring issues. If your team needs help then reach out to the vendor and provide all logs or work via screen sharing to troubleshoot. If a change is required, it needs to be implemented ASAP by following your teams emergency change process to prevent recurrences. If there are issues that can be fixed by a lower level team, then document the symptom, issue and the resolution (with screen shots if possible) and then provide them tot he team and schedule a training sessions if it’s required. If you signed additional projects with your customer, you you need to determine if your team can do the work without impacting incident recovery duration and any applicable SLAs. If you cannot, a temporary employee(s) may need to be hired to perform the work. If you cannot hire a temporary employee(s), a decision will need to be made between missing the SLA (and paying any penalty) against the profit of the project and determine if it’s a good deal. Documentation (with screen shots) is very important for every issue that occurs so all team members are able to resolve all issues and that recovery isn’t dependent only on certain team members who may or may not be available. If you do all of the above and you are still having issues with aged tickets then your team is understaffed. To fix this you should hire additional team members (put a business case together and present to the executives) unless the finances are not flexible enough to do so, in that case you will need drive greater efficiency by being more aggressive in the issue documentation and assignment of recovery to lower level teams or other team members, ensuring that focus remains on the most aged issues as they may affect customer satisfaction. All this boils down to how the SLA is impacted and if it cheaper to breach the SLA than hire more staff to meet it. Although most contracts will allow the customer to cancel the contract if an SLA is missed for so many months in a row and if this is the case, then this is a good case to get approval to hire additional staff. wp.me/p1JPIa-1Q
Posted on: Sun, 09 Jun 2013 23:03:59 +0000
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