Wednesday May 07, 2008

Demand Rational Troubleshooting at Sun ? I am fortunate to work in the Global Services Organisation at Sun, but due to co-location I work on the same floor as the Solaris RPE group.

These engineers are very skilled at solving problems, however, because they are specialists in their area they really need a good problem description, we call that a Problem Statement and beyond that some good information about the facts around the Problem Starement, we call that a Specification.

Over the last few weeks, I've been contacted more by Service Account Managers and Client Execs about SGRT and what we can do to help our customers.

On this blog Jim Moore, talks about demanding Rational Troubleshooting. It's a good view from the pointy end of fixing difficult problems, but the Troubleshooting process applies at evey level of Technical Support.

If you want to demand SGRT is applied to a complex problem, feel free to ask, or engage me. I'd be happy to facilitate.

Mark DOT Hayden at Sun DOT Com (2008-05-07 05:03:51.0) Permalink

Tuesday May 06, 2008

More teaching SGRT, seeing a common need.

As Global Program Manager for the Sun Global Resolution Troubleshooting method also known as KT Resolve outside of Sun, I get the opportunity to teach on a regular basis.

Last week, I had the pleasure of teaching in Sheffield to a mixture of Sun staff and staff from the company we partner to support a very large NHS project. I was supporting another Program Leader who had not taught in around 2 years, and we have a policy of co-teaching to ensure the quality of our instructors remains high. In this case, the PL in question did a great job, and is teaching the rest of the class this week, without me :-)

Our troubleshooting programme can be deployed in any area of the company, and it's a delight to see after 2 days the students find their way using the process to solve some complex issues. In this particular class, the students brought 3 very real and live problems they had been struggling with, and made some good progress in understanding more about the problem they were facing. So I left Sheffield with a good feeling, as I always enjoy teaching this class, and seeing the high quality work the students delivered.

As our longest serving PL says, here understanding the problem you are working on, gets you at least halfway to solving it.

During the 2 days I was teaching, I was contacted by other colleagues who understand what SGRT can do for Sun and our customers, to see how we can help companies who we have a business relationship with define their problems better. Their common need was that the teams they have collaborating, across the world, often do not fully describe the problem they have, making the job much harder for the team responsible for solving the issue. It also makes the Time to Solve much longer.

I'm back to Sheffield in 2 weeks to teach another group, and I'm sure we'll repeat the success.

(2008-05-06 03:09:01.0) Permalink

Monday March 03, 2008

When did it happen ? and When in the Lifecycle ?
I recently visited a customer in Northern California to facilitate a Sun Global Resolution Troubleshooting session with a colleague of mine, Peter Brentnall from the Solaris RPE group.

Often when we run these facilitations, we learn a lot about the complexity of the environment and the inconvenience the customer puts up with when experiencing the issue they've asked us to help with. It's not always clear in these types of environment whose problem it is to fix, i.e Hardware vendor, Application, Middle Tier, Networking Infrastructure etc. If there is a piece of Sun somewhere in there, we are happy to help move the understanding on into the right area, Sun or not.

We also find that sometimes, the facilitation brings teams together who work day to day solving issues, but often the facilitation session is the first time they have all been co-located, working as a team in the same room to solve the issue(s).

When we go through the process, in most cases we find more than one concern, often many, and determine which one or ones are the most serious, and tackle those first.

In this particular customer's case, they were experiencing some slowness at random times of the day, although a fairly regular slowdown around 4pm, however, through questioning we determined that this slowdown of the system at around 4pm was evident long before the Sun system was in place. They were coming up to a particularly busy period in their business, and wanted it to go smoothly.

We left after a day of troubleshooting with some suggested actions for the customer to undertake, some of which the customer already had in motion before we got there, and some actions resulting from troubleshooting and using knowledge and experience.

In my experience, they key areas to focus on with these types of issues, is When exactly did it happen ? and What was the user doing at the time they noticed the issue ?

The What the user is doing, is what we call the Lifecycle, what was going on on the system at the time. From a troubleshooting perspective, this information is key in being able to link that back to any system or network logs that can help explain what the user saw.

On Site facilitation is always a challenging but very enjoyable piece of my work. I am sure there are more problems we can help Sun's customers with. I'll be reminding our Account Teams shortly how they can engage us.

If you are a Sun customer, and have an issue you think we might be able to help with, feel free to contact us. We have skilled facilitators in most parts of the world. We usualy find a willing volunteer within 24 hours.

Mark Hayden (2008-03-03 03:03:18.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Monday September 03, 2007

A year has passed since the last Blog update..... Time flys when you have fun, I had not realised my last blog entry was so long ago. Since my last update, I have engaged with the IBIS project to integrate the SGRT method into our Call Handling system, as well as lead the sub-team helping to define the process and solve the issues related to call handling, from the point where the problem comes into the Technical Solution Centre's through to bug fixing.

As a result, I've been travelling much more than usual, spending time away from home and my family, and more time working with some new colleagues in the US, from Sun and Oracle. Working on the IBIS project has been fun, challenging and I've learned a great deal, all while trying to keep my Troubleshooting responsibilities active.

In September 2006, I was invited to speak at Kepner-Tregoe's client conference in Frankfurt, where I talked a little bit about the Adaptive Support Model and Sun's plans, in the audience were other Troubleshooting program leaders from IBM, Dell, Ericsson and others. What became clear was that we share similar issues, have seen similar results from our process improvement initiatives, and still have some problems we still need to solve. And the Adaptive Model coould well be one of the solutions to some of our concerns.

Also while in Frankfurt, my ex-Sun colleague, who now leads the Resolve program at Kepner Tregoe asked me to do a piece to camera. This was an impromtu event, we could n't find a quiet place in the hotel, so we improvised with a corner of a hotel room and some regular lighting. When I work out how to embed a WMV file, I'll post it. There will be more regular updates, as I have been thinking about how we better collaborate, with engineers located all over the world, with customers who have 24x7 support needs and how do we facilitate those hard and critical issues. Project Wonderland and the MKP20 demo look interesting.

We also have soome CEC news to come as well.... (2007-09-03 04:27:40.0) Permalink

Wednesday August 09, 2006

Training Partners in SGRT

I have recently returned from delivering a class to some Sun Partner engineers in South Africa. This has been in the planning stage for some time, and in the last 2 weeks of July we were able to gather the senior engineers working for Sun Partner companies in SA.

The engineers did a great job , and from the feedback forms we hand out at the end of every class, they clearly enjoyed the experience.

The emphasis was on making good troubleshooters 'Great Troubleshooters' , and with a bit of practice they should be able to achieve that.

The aim is to enable our Partner engineers to talk the same troubleshooting language as any of our Sun Engineers.

We continue to plan to train Sun Partners in good use of our Rational Troubleshooting programme. We have a little more to do in sub-Sahara Africa, and already have some plans underway to deliver some classes in Russia.

So if you want to know more about our partner troubleshooting programme. Drop me an email. Mark DOT Hayden AT SUN DOT COM . I am sure you can work out how to email me ;-)

Mark (2006-08-09 02:55:25.0) Permalink

Friday June 30, 2006

Mixing Online and Face to Face Class works

The Sun Global Resolution Troubleshooting class traditionally is a 4 day classroom training / workshop. Typically with 12+ students and 2 Program Leaders.

With the emerging trend to Work From Home and geographically dispersed teams, it's a challenge to get people together in the classroom, as well as a considerable expense to get many people to travel and take the class. With a leaner organisation, there is often a management need to try and minimise the time people spend away from supporting the customer.

With some guidance from Kepner-Tregoe, we utilised a Blended approach to the problem of remote teams.

i.e They spend some time learning the concepts online, and then a few weeks later we get together and work through the practical elements. Thereby ensuring that the students are able to demonstrate in a practical way they have understood what it is they have learned and ensuring we continue to train engineers in rational troubleshooting with the same high quality expectations.

It also gives the Program Leader, the opportunity to coach as required.

I spent the start of this week in Leeds, working with the Tarantella engineers who had been our willing volunteers ;-)

So what was the result, well, at the end of the 2 days we spent together, I would say the students are as well prepared as those who completed the regular 4 day class. Their hard work during the online portion and time practicing during the classroom section means they are ready to troubleshoot our customers issues in the SGRT way.

Our Blended programme will continue to roll out globally, more news as it happens. Also, as our new financial year starts tomorrow, one of our priorities for FY07, is to work with our Partners to enable them to troubleshoot the same. I'll post the results from that trip towards the end of July.

It leaves me to say, 'Happy 4th of July' to my American friends and colleagues, and as I was once asked, 'No we don't celebrate it here in the UK' :-)

(2006-06-30 02:18:09.0) Permalink

Wednesday June 21, 2006

Welcome to more Troubleshooters
Last week I had the priveledge of co-teaching an SGRT class in Prague. This class followed on from last years Prague SGRT class, with 12 new students, hired in the last 12 months or so and working for the Solaris OP/N1 sustaining team.

The new offices are a little further out from the city, however, the public transport system was good, and we made it to the office each morning in around 20 minutes. Dan Berg talks about the opening ceremony here.

The students were a pleasure to work with, they engaged in the break outs well, and we saw some good signs of their understanding of the process. The next steps are to determine if we can run a SGRT Red Belt (Facilitator) class to install a coaching expert directly in Prague.

Next week I am in Leeds to teach some students who have learned about Troubleshooting remotely. This is something new for both myself and the students, so I am planning the teaching this week to ensure things go well.

More details after my trip to Leeds.
(2006-06-21 00:59:15.0) Permalink

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

Wednesday April 05, 2006

Good luck and thanks for all the fish
Today marks the day that Steve White, no longer works for Sun and starts his new working life with Kepner-Tregoe.
So where does that leave us at Sun, without the man who led the Sun Global Resolution Troubleshooting program office for so long ?

Well, we like to think in pretty good shape, working with Steve was a real pleasure, as a team we would develop and push the boundries when exploring the use of rational troubleshooting in Sun and when engaging with our customers.
So for those customers of KT who meet with Steve, you are going to have some fun, Steve's enthusiasm and experience will I am sure help you in your troubleshooting endeavours and I am sure help KT further improve what it is they can do to enhance your business.

Here at Sun we have a whole host of areas we are exploring, Remote video teaches, Customer engagements, Tool enhancements and further class development of Facilitators. We've been doing this for 11 years now, and we are still finding new and cool things to do.
We'll continue to work with Steve, after all, Sun is known for its cool technology and developing products that make a difference and we have many more aspects we want to work on in our goal to solve customer problems in a timely and rational way. Maybe one day in the future, you'll be reading a KT blog, who knows ;-)

(2006-04-05 03:15:47.0) Permalink

Thursday March 09, 2006

We met our CTO last week

Steve White and myself met with Dan Berg last week, Dan is the Sun Services CTO. We had the opportunity to talk about Sun Global Resolution Troubleshooting.

We tried something new with Dan, we wanted him to solve a problem. You can read more about it here.

Thanks for the comments Dan.

Mark Hayden (2006-03-09 07:30:49.0) Permalink

Wednesday March 08, 2006

Sometimes it works like this too ....

I have to admit I use our troubleshooting process at home, and invariably it's for specialists to take my observations, and make sense of them unising their knowledge and experience. It's worked with Garage technicians and Television repair companies.

Here a colleague started the process and had an aha moment. Nice one Chris .

Mark

(2006-03-08 07:24:07.0) Permalink

Friday February 17, 2006

Global Collaboration

I was visiting a US colleague last week, who is also a Program Leader for Sun Global Resolution Troubleshooting, and he wanted me to have a look at a Problem Specification that he had facilitated along with a Solaris OP N/1 PL.

This was a problem being seen in 3 customers around the world, 2 US Customers and a French Customer. By using our global resources and troubleshooting methods, our investigations helped the senior technical resources develop a suitable Test Case to help produce the fix.

When discussing this problem with the senior engineers, they told me that gathering the data about what these customers had in common, with what machines were having the problem, as well as knowing what machines they had that were not having the problem was instrumental in helping them focus on the specific areas to build the test case.

When questioning customers for more details about their problem in a structured way really does help. Steve White mentions this in his blog, where he talks about the 15 Minute Spec .

(2006-02-17 06:21:05.0) Permalink

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]