Thursday May 11, 2006

Meeting other technology companies is cool
Occassionally I have the priviledge to meet other companies considering using KT's Rational Troubleshooting products or companies that have a deployment of KT Resolve (Sun Global Resolution Troubleshooting).

It's a great opportunity to share experiences, discuss organisational challenges and meet other like minded service professionals. Ultimately the more discussion and communication between similar companies interested in solving problems in a quick and rational manner will improve everyones understanding and deployment of good troubleshooting techniques.

Yesterday I met with a technology company that is growing rapidly and is considering deploying KT Resolve. Their growth in business and therefore support personnel reminds me of the late 90's here at Sun.

It caused me to think back about how Sun met that challenge of the 'dot com' boom, with the huge amount of new hires coming into the company, me included.

In order to meet the needs of the customers, many of whom were on a steep learning curve themselves, good processes, escalation paths and troubleshooting techniques were vital to cope with the huge demand for resources whilst our new hires get to grips with their new surroundings, learn about the products and processes in place to help them solve the customer issues.

Sun initially deployed Analytic Troubleshooting (ATS) and this helped address the critical customer issues we encountered at that time, and within 6 weeks of me joining the company I was on the ATS class, incidentally I happened to be taught by Steve White, who many years later I'd be working with.

So back to my guests yesterday, they had come to see how Sun uses on a daily basis, SGRT.

So I ran through a quick Situation Appraisal to list their concerns and used that as our agenda for the time we spent together.

At around noon, I showed them SGRTool, which is our online Specification storage tool, and just picked the latest entry in the tool, which was only 15 minutes old. So we looked at it, it was well formed, had some good data, but there was only data in the 'IS' column.....

This was fine, as we suspected the engineer was still in data gathering mode.

We came back to Specification about 15 minutes later, and we all noticed, more data had been entered, this time completing more of the 'IS NOT' column. This was not a setup, but a live customer escalation the engineer was working on.

Later, during our Solution Centre tour, the engineer was tucked away in a conference room, on the phone, with a system, we suspected, gathering more data. I later found out, that was indeed the case.

So i hope this was a good demonstration that Sun does indeed have the KT troubleshooting principles embedded into it's support processes, the right tools to allow engineers to record their findings, and visible to any other engineer in Sun that might need to assist and collaborate.

So whether your organisation is growing rapidly or you want your existing support personnel to maximise their efficiency when troubleshooting complex problems we suggest you evaluate your troubleshooting process to determine how effective your questioning is.

So do you follow a process or do you Whack-a-mole ?

MarkH
(2006-05-11 01:33:12.0) Permalink