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