Thursday January 12, 2006

Customer Engagement Success

One of the benefits of being an Sun [SM] Global Resolution Troubleshooting Program Leader is the opportunity to go on site and help facilitate an SGRT session to tackle a customer issue. We always start with a goodSituation Appraisal and usually move into Problem Analysis.

Recently, I was asked to facilitate a session in London, for a well known supermarket that has a lot of Sun kit, and some tape drives that were seeing a performance problem at one of their depots. We were asked to help get to the bottom of this and a formal SGRT session was arranged.

When building the team to work through the issue, it is a very good idea to ensure you have all the right experts in the room, or at the very least immediate access to them. The whole principle is to ask the process questions, and get the factual answers, without access to the Subject Matter Experts, the facilitation may flounder. We had a fairly large team of 7 Sun Staff, 1 third party tape engineer and 4 Customer staff.

We spent the whole morning working through Situation Appraisal, and determined our highest priority concern and documented our Problem Statement, the afternoon session went into the Problem Analysis stage. At the end of the day, we had a Most Probable Cause, but it had a major assumption, we needed to see the fault occur somewhere else.

The problem we were working on, had only been seen in one depot, and there were a couple more, configured the same way. If our Most Probable Cause was indeed the True cause, some evidence of it occurring elsewhere would be very helpful.

We presented our recommendations to the customer, along with our Action Plan based upon our MPC, and a week or so later, the customer informed us they had seen the same issue at another depot.

The Program Office supports the facilitation requests whenever it can, in the instance described above, I had not heard from the team for a few weeks and bumped into the Technical Lead in the canteen to get the good news that the SAN patching we had identified as our MPC was indeed the fix for the problem.

The customer in question had taken part in a program we ran in early 2005 to train them in SGRT, so this was a great example of using the process together to solve a problem they were seeing.

SGRT skills are globally available at Sun, if you are a Sun Customer, or have a Sun Customer with a problem that you think we can help solve by applying a Rational Approach, maybe you can contact the SGRT team.

Mark Hayden SGRT Program Leader (2006-01-12 03:14:08.0) Permalink

Friday July 29, 2005

Beijing SGRT switched on

We have a strategic direction in Sun to implement the advantages of the SGRT process globally – to create an End-toEnd implementation of the same troubleshooting method no matter where the call is logged. I'm pleased to announce that the support staff handling the Mandarin and Korean customers in Beijing have been trained and are being coached in the use of SGRT. If you're a customer who logs calls into the Beijing support centre, and you're also a user of KT troubleshooting, you'll be talking the same language.

Friday April 08, 2005

Batman has his Bat Signal, we have a web form

In the last week, we've had a few facilitation requests to assist Sun Technical staff with some complex problems. Facilitation requests come in to the Program Office to ask for a Program Leader to take the technical team through the Sun Global Resolution Troubleshooting Process.

The place to start, should you need to engage us is :

Click Here

This link will only work inside the Sun Wide Area Network. If you are a customer looking for help please engage your local Customer Care Centre and direct them here. Allow us at least 3 working days to try and accomodate your need. (2005-04-08 02:37:51.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Wednesday April 06, 2005

MCA recognises Sun Microsystems and Kepner-Tregoe

Kepner-Tregoe and Sun Microsystems picked up an award on Monday evening at the MCA Awards Dinner at the Park Lane Hilton for the work we did on Operational Performance.

The project team developed a coaching model for ensuring the continued best practice of the Sun Global Resolution Troubleshooting method when used inside Sun Microsystem's support organisation. The team reduced the Time to Solve customer problems by over 52%.

The team (some members pictured below) consisted of Sun engineers, Managers and SGRT Program Leaders from many different parts of the world.

Pictured here are : Mark Hayden (Sun), Mike Bird (KT), Chris Fujinami (KT), Jim Zimmermann (KT), Steve White (Sun) & Berrie Schuurhuis (Sun)

(2005-04-06 05:22:28.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Friday March 04, 2005

Rock dropped into pond

It's not very often that I directly benefit from the results of the work that I do outside of my own department when encouraging and assisting in the implementation of SGRT in Sun, and yesterday I did. I went to help out in a Managed Services operation that Sun is running on behalf of a customer. Soon after the Managed Services management team were formed they asked to be trained in SGRT, and over the course of the last few months all of them have been trained, triggers for use installed and mentoring running.

The customer seems to have dropped a metaphorical stone into the teeming pond of the many suppliers that make up this project, and right now the splashing of the water is still going on. There's fear, uncertainty and dread, and for a few days all those who have been made aware that there is a problem are waiting for the foam to clear. The suppliers know that the customer is upset, and not what the customer is upset about – the holistic detail has not yet filtered down to the individual teams who supply stuff.

It was good to be there, to watch the people who I'd worked with on the installation of the SGRT capability saying “What's the list of concerns?”, “What's the problem statement?”, “until we have a clear understanding of the problem we're not going to simply make activity, let's concentrate on getting a clear understanding first”...

It was a beautiful thing to watch, and in the time period when management of the situation is more necessary than usual, it's good to have confidence that the skills and processes that they have will maximise the chances of a successful outcome.

Thursday February 10, 2005

SGRT Facilitation update
On Monday and Tuesday, an SGRT faciliation occurred for a customer who was experiencing some hangs. The configuration of the storage was such that there was no business impact or outage to the customer, but the system redundancy was reduced.

The team met at 1pm on Monday, and consisted of the Service Account Manager, Solution Centre engineer, System Architect, Escalation Manager and two Sun Global Resolution [sm] Troubleshooting Program Leaders.

We started with a good hour of Situation Appraisal, and extracted 35 concerns. We then agreed on the Problem statement that we were going to take into Day 2.....

On day 2, we were joined by the Escalation Engineer and Field engineer. A team of 8 focused on gathering the data to help move the problem on.

The Problem Analysis investigation took us up to 5pm, where we had some Likely Causes and some Actions to discus with the customer. What was interesting was the data relating to when the problem was occurring. Here are the charts of the timings of the failures.
(2005-02-10 07:53:42.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Monday February 07, 2005

Problem Facilitation
Today I have scheduled my first SGRT facilitation. We have a customer escalation that involves some third party kit that does not produce much in the way of error messages. The customer is seeing this piece of kit hang, and as we support the system and storage and use this third party product in the storage solution we need to investigate.

We have an SGRT session today and tomorrow, with the objective of recording as much information as possible, and determine where we need more data. All the key technical engineers will be there tomorrow, so today the focus is on producing a good Situation Appraisal and setting up the Problem Analysis for tomorrow.

More when the facilitation is complete.
(2005-02-07 03:40:29.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Thursday January 20, 2005

Kepner-Tregoe Process Achievement Award
We had some good news this week, our Sun Sigma project looking at demonstrating a reduction in the time to closure of customer support calls was awarded KT's Grand Prize in their Process Achievement Awards. The eSGR Sigma project was entereted in the Organisational Use of Process category - projects where clients have deployed process to make significant and enduring improvement to business performance. Well done to the Project team, more details as we get them.

Tuesday December 14, 2004

The Story of Customus and the broken purple box.

The story of Customus and the Broken Purple Box

Once upon a time in city called Wall City and in the Wall Road there lived a very rich person called Customus. He always wore a tie and a cowboy hat. He had a purple box that he bought from Sun. He loved that box. It helped him make lots and lots of money. The purple box was up and running for many many years without a glitch. One would never see something like a 'blue screen of death' on those robust boxes. One fine day while Customus was busy making money, the purple box broke. Customus brought the box to Sun for getting it fixed. At Sun there lived a very smart guy named Engenius who loved taking care of broken purple boxes. To figure out how to fix the broken box, Engenius had to ask questions to Customus. To do so Engenius would have to first think of a question and then ask Customus. Engenius worked hard to understand what caused the purple box to stop working. He asked many questions , gathered data and locked himself away to think about what caused the problem. This made Customus wait for a long time. He was getting unhappy. He had also started getting bad dreams of him buying Big Blue boxes or the Micro Red-Yellow-Green-Blue boxes. Worst of all he had a dream of buying useless Printer boxes. Engenius was still researching the cause and still hadn't figured out why the box broke. Noproblema is the Engenius' guardian angel. She came down to help Engenius. She brought with her a scroll of sacred parchment which had eight simple big questions written in Gold. WHAT IS? WHAT IS NOT? WHERE IS? WHERE IS NOT? WHEN IS? WHEN IS NOT? EXTENT IS? EXTENT IS NOT? Engenius then asked the right questions to Customus in English and quickly understood what the problem was and how to fix it. He fixed the broken box in the next hour. Customus was happy. He bought many purple boxes. Engenius made money and a magical number called SUNW went up. Every one was happy.

Moral of the Story: Sun Global ResolutionTroubleshooting helps SUN serve it's customers better.

Some content used with permission from Kepner-Tregoe.
Story by CB

THE END

Training customers in Rational Process Last week we started on our next Sun Global Resolution Troubleshooting Sigma project and commenced our training of customers. With the blessing of Kepner-Tregoe we are exploring the benefits of customers reporting problems to Sun in a format we know helps resolve problems faster.

The first two days went well, and after just speaking with the Service Account Manager, I believe they used the process to tackle a new problem. Cool !

We will post more details as we can. In the meantime, I'm going to post our Customus story....... (2004-12-14 06:32:33.0) Permalink

Wednesday September 29, 2004

It's not just us...
Since 1995 Sun has been using a Rational Process to solve customer issues in Sun. in 2000 we developed a hybrid course to the Analytic TroubleShooting and Problem Solving and Decision Making courses that Kepner Tregoe have been selling and supporting for many years. It's just that we haven't told anyone outside Sun about it until very recently. Sure, many customers have benefitted from the application of SGRT, yet both internally and externally word has not really got out. It's interesting to see how the world of blogging gives mention to the use of SGRT at the grass-roots level in Sun - a couple I've stumbled across are mentions from Alan Hargreaves and Jimmo . We know that a number of companies in the Computer Industry and in our customer base also use ATS or PSDM in solving computer problems, and if you're internally creating specifications then logging a regular case with us, just to let you know that we can read specifications and can massively accelerate the speed and quality of support by working with you, using the same troubleshooting process that you do. If you're reading this and wondering how to get a piece of this action - send us an email. (2004-09-29 00:28:31.0) Permalink

Monday September 27, 2004

In the meantime.....
Since this has only been online a while, I'm surprised by the number of visits. In the meantime, should you want to know a little more about SGRT feel free to stop by http://sgr.central . Regretably, this is only available to those of you inside the Sun Network. If there is enough interest, we'll put the details onto an external page. (2004-09-27 08:42:55.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Sun Global Resolution Trouble Shooting
This blog will chronicle the investment Sun Microsystems is making in the use of Rational Process inside Sun. Partnering with Kepner-Tregoe, Suppliers, Staff and customers to use effective Trouble Shooting Techniques to solve complex problems. (2004-09-27 06:41:15.0) Permalink