If you are leading a technical, production support department, only focusing on problems, post “go live” is reactive and does not paint the entire customer experience picture. Instead, you should gain visibility into all product issues and all tickets, including those found during testing or found during projects. You should understand the volume and causes, and then identify trends across ticket sources. This allows you to move into proactive mode and influence product release decisions that will have the biggest bang for the buck.

The most common buckets of cases/tickets are:

• Project cases/tickets: Those tickets opened during the lifecycle of a project, prior to a customer’s Go Live date. These problems may be unique to that individual customer, or problems that affect all customers using that version of the product. In most companies, the professional services department owns and manages these tickets against an individual project, but may not be looking at these tickets holistically across projects.
• Internal cases/tickets: Those tickets opened by internal, company employees, usually in software development or engineering, as they find defects in the core product code through the course of testing or fixing other defects. These are product specific, not customer specific.  Ideally, software development and product management should oversee these tickets and prioritize which defects will be fixed (or not fixed) in which future release, and notify internal and external customers.
• Production support cases/tickets: Those tickets opened by customers who are using the product in a production environment. The technical support or customer support department usually owns and manages these cases.

Important:

If you analyze and trend all three case types; project, internal and production cases, you will identify that a portion of case types are exactly the same.

For example, in project Cool Customer defect 12 was found and then fixed only in that customer’s project, not across products. The project manager notified Engineering and an internal case was opened for the same defect and is now sitting in the internal case backlog waiting to be prioritized for a future release. In the mean time, six customers using that product called Tech Support and opened up tickets for the same product defect.

Why should you care?

Leverage: Having your arms around this data gives you a lot more leverage to influence product management or engineering decisions related to product fixes or product enhancements. Instead of making a business case that includes 100 production support cases, you can make a business case that includes 300 cases: 100 production, 100 internal and 100 project.

Customer Loyalty: This gives you visibility into the entire customer experience. If you see that Cool Customer experienced a significant number of product defects during project, they may need more TLC post Go Live. Your support team may need to spend extra time building the customer’s trust in the company or the product to help instill customer loyalty.

Project Handover Management: Keeping tabs on open project cases weeks or months before a project handover, will allow you to head off any unforeseen issues at the time of Go Live. Check out a recent blog post, “Don’t be the victim of a customer project handover gone wrong“.

Last… you may be thinking, why should I have to do this trending across case or ticket types? It is not my job.

Caring about the customer experience across all touch points, building customer loyalty and helping your company contain costs, is everybody’s job.  Just do it…  An who doesn’t want to be a Rock Star?

Related articles

• Customer Experience Management Best Practices (themorningsocial.wordpress.com)
• 10 Reasons Why Incident Prevention Trumps Incident Management (theoperationsblog.com)
• Why Experience is Key to Customer Loyalty (conversationagent.com)
• 3 Ways to Guarantee Customer Service Failure (customerthink.com)

• When important things need to get done, you and/or your team state with confidence, “I own that. We will review what needs to get done and provide an update next week. We will achieve the end of month target.”
• When things don’t go as planned, you and/or your team state, “My bad. This should have been done by X date, but I missed that mark. I apologize and would like to discuss an alternative date. I assure you that we’ll meet the adjusted time line.”
• When a direct report misses a date for a task that is due to your boss, as the leader, you take ownership, “Unfortunately X project is not ready yet. I should have done a better job planning with the team to make this date. I assure you that we will provide the deliverable by Friday.”
• When team members do not like a decision that “management” made, you respond with, “I actually made that decision. I had to make some difficult calls, but I weighed all options, got input from the leadership team and decided that this was the best course of action”.

When I am in discussions with accountable people, it is a breath of fresh air. The conversation focuses on the job at hand and driving results. The focus is NOT on egos, passing the buck or making excuses. I hear phrases such as, “I will”, “I can”, “I did”, “I missed that, but assure you I will get back on track”.

Alternatively, lack of accountability is one of the LEAST attractive personality or leadership traits. Consistently acting this way will kill your credibility, reputation and effectiveness, as well as that of your teams’. We should ban words and phrases  like “maybe”, “probably” and “not sure who owns this”.

What are you doing to drive an accountability culture in your organization?

Related articles

• Credibility: It Still Matters (leadershipchallenge.typepad.com)
• How Do You Establish Accountability? (managebetternow.com)

When we consider options to improve the customer experience, discussions often lead to complex process improvements or expensive tool enhancements, but there is something we can all do that is relatively easy and almost free – keep our customers well informed during the problem solving progress.

There are three major components to the act of keeping a customer well informed:

1. Acknowledge that work has begun on their problem
2. Share the problem solving activities
3. Set and follow through on time frame expectations

Based on feedback I have received in customer satisfaction surveys and directly from clients, keeping customers informed during the problem solving progress, is often more important that the total time of resolution.  In other words, frequent and relevant communication can trump speed- when done effectively.

Here are some specific examples:

1. Acknowledge that work has begun:

• My name is Marci, one of the Widget A Product Specialists, and I have just begun to work on your ticket
• Mr. customer, I received and am working on your ticket about Error Message 123

2. Share the problem solving activities:

• I will review the problem logs you sent and attempt to identify the cause of the error
• I will consult with one of our senior engineers, who has worked on many similar problems
• I will review the technical release notes and see if this change is related to the recent product version change
• This issue looks very familiar. I will check our knowledge base articles for a solution

3. Set and follow through on time frame expectations

• I have dealt with similar problems before and I expect this will take about 4 hours to resolve
• I will post updates on my progress in our ticketing system and these will be visible in the self-support online portal
• I will send you an email in two hours and let you know where I stand in the problem resolution process

I love this process because anyone can do it, from your brand new employees, to your executives to your very experienced support engineers. In addition, every type of customer will find this valuable: individuals, small businesses or large corporations.

Although the process is relatively simple and somewhat intuitive, I have found that it does not always happen. We often get wrapped up in the technical side of problem solving and forget about the human element. We spend more time talking about SLA achievement than the processes that lead up to the problem resolution.

It’s also important to remember that technology can enable the communication process. If you have an eSupport option and can publish public comments, the act of communicating can become part of the problem solving process, not in addition to. Most CRM systems also have notification options, and you can set up  a process by which customers will receive email updates at certain intervals after the case has been opened- and when the case has been resolved. We can address the human side, leveraging our existing technology.

Let’s work together so that we don’t leave opportunity on the table and provide our customers with the best experiences in our collective industries.

Related articles

• How to Maintain Traditional Customer Service in the Social Media Age(mashable.com)

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• SLA is not just for customers – count everything(sillyfeatures.com)

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When running a complex business operation, there will always be problems to solve and coworkers that you disagree with, but if you take action on every problem and confront every disagreement, you will actually lessen not increase progress. Strategically, picking your battles will increase your leadership effectiveness.

How do you know which battles to fight? Ask yourself this set of questions…

• Does the issue in question tie to one of your department or company priorities?
• Even though you disagree with the idea or approach, can you live with it? Will it still address the problem, but in a different way?
• Working with others is about give and take. Has this person outwardly supported one of your ideas in the past?
• Does the person you disagree with have more expertise about the problem than you do? Is your ego getting in the way?
• Should you even be involved with this issue or do you need to let go and allow the right people solve it, i.e. delegate and empower?

If you are still not sure, wait at least another day and/or run the scenario by a trusted coworker or boss and get their input. It can difficult if/when you are too close to an issue.

If you do decide to pick a battle, you must approach it very strategically. You must think through and be able to articulate the business impact of the possible wrong decision and the benefits of your approach. You must bring data, stories, pictures etc.. whatever will help illustrate your point of view.

Don’t pick your battle until you are prepared. If you need more time, try this phrase one of my recent bosses uses effectively  “I need some time to process your ideas (or point of view). Can we meet again at XX time?” By using the word “process”, you are not stating disagreement yet- so the person does not get defensive and you lay the groundwork for a positive follow-up meeting.

Strategically choosing your battles will improve your leadership effectiveness – you will get more of the right work done, build stronger relationships and continually  develop team members.  It is so true… there are often bigger fish to fry!

However, the technique that stood out the most to me was this: “To make a compelling case for change, don’t just point at the numbers and demand better ones. Your abstract message won’t stick. Instead, make key managers experience your organization’s problems.”

Here is one example from Bratton’s playbook. At that time, New Yorker’s viewed the subways as one of the most dangerous places in their city, but the NY Transit’s senior staff ignored this feedback and believed that the subway riders were over-reacting. To change their mind-set, Bratton required all New York transit officers, including himself, to commute to work by subway. Once they observed and experienced the gangs, the criminals and the overcrowded conditions, they grasped the need for change and took responsibility for making it happen.

These type of “aha” experiences do not all have to happen on a subway. You can experience the same things on a few conference calls.  Here is an example…

I had received feedback from a key leader in my organization that he and his team members were being asked to do things that were beyond their scope of work and that were very stressful. As a result, morale was suffering and some of their primary duties were being neglected.

I understood that change would need to happen, but did not realize the urgency until I personally experienced the pain by attending a series of meetings with the leader. First hand, I heard the demands, felt the pressure and met all of the key players. I also put myself out there to respond to some of the demands.  After these experiences, “I got it” and took personal responsibility for driving faster change.

This experience reminded me that I can not just rely on reports, presentations and conversations to understand what changes need to happen. I must put myself out there and experience first hand what my teams experience every day.

Related articles

• The Danger Of Conference Room Decision Making (The Operations Blog)
• Video: Bill Bratton weighs in on new crime stats (cbsnews.com)
• How Beer & Change Management Go Together (The Operations Blog)

If you work in a big ticket software, technical support organization then you and your team members have likely been the victim of a customer project handover gone wrong.  This is not as serious as other crimes, but addressing a red, project handover is of critical importance.

A “project handover” is the point in time that a customer installing a large ticket software product moves from their “project phase” to their “production support phase”. In the project phase, the professional services organization manages the customer engagement and activities focus on planning, testing and implementation.  In theory, when the customer moves to the “production support phase”, the project phase is completed, software defects addressed, the customer has gone “live” and the software is working as designed.

Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Often times the customer is moved to production support too soon, resulting in frustration, long work hours, both employee and customer dissatisfaction and, at times, financial penalties.

How can you fight the crimes that occur during a troubled software implementation engagement? Lieutenant Reynolds recommends that you….

1) Define the laws of the handover

Start by clearly defining the project handover process itself. Partner with your sales and professional services organization to map out and agree on the sequence of events leading up to and immediately following the project go-live, that will ensure that the handover is successful.

2) Assign a division to the process and traffic cop to each project

There should be one handover process owner, and in my opinion, it should be the professional services organization, and more specifically a Project Manager should own the successful completion and handover of an individual project. When there are multiple owners to the steps in a project, no-one takes accountability for the overall project handover’s success.

3) Involve the entire squad at the start of the shift

Involve technical support and engineering at the beginning of the project. The more that the support teams knows about the customer and their project, the more successful they will be in supporting the live customer. Bringing them in at the very beginning allows the support team to provide advice or input, and plan far ahead for success, e.g. appropriate staffing.

4) Build project handover activities in the scope of the project hours  (could not think of a clever police analogy)

When the professional support team calculates the full project hours and resources required, the tasks and time for project handover must be included. If not, many of the success steps will be skipped and the handover will have problems, as the project team is rushed on to new, billable work.

Taking a step back, the hours required for project handover tasks are not material compared to the hours required for all of the other project steps. But, the small investment will have major returns! The customer will be much happier with the outcome of their project. Customer satisfaction, will lead to customer loyalty, which will lead to more billable engagements and new business referrals.

Taking short cuts in this area can have major, negative ramifications, while investing in them can have a measurable, ROI.

5) Like a good District Attorney, negotiate the details of when the customer is ready to hand over

Before the customer nears go live, the project team and the support team should meet and discuss the criteria for allowing a project handover to occur. There should be some standard criteria for all customers, for example, no open Severity 1 (outages) tickets, no open Severity 2 (critical) tickets and less than 10 Severity 3 (ongoing support) tickets.  This criteria will vary depending on your product and business needs.

Since all software has product defects, and some are more important than others, it is not realistic to assume every issue has been addressed before the project changes hands.

6) Like a good lawyer, negotiate the details of who will handle any open tickets

Agreeing on the number of open issues is one step, but it is equally as important to determine who will do the work to close out the open issues. It may be helpful to walk through each open ticket and agree on a go forward business owner, e.g. the project team will close out certain types of tickets, while production support will take over a different type. This work assignment will vary depending on your product , policies and business roles.

7) Submit your paperwork on time.. and don’t leave anything out, or the Sarge will be mad

A successful project handover requires that the customer is ready AND the internal staff members are ready. More specifically, your handover activities must include tactics for information transfer from the project team to the production support team and include details about the customer’s environment, software customizations and anything else that you consider pertinent. This information transfer may happen at the time of handover in the form of training and documentation. You should also consider processes that will support ongoing questions, months after the customer is in production.

If your company can ensure consistent, successful customer project handovers, than your company will reap many benefits including increases in customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, new business and employee engagement. Why not start the crime fighting process right now?

Background:

It all started because I was bored.

I had been working out regularly since I was in my early 20s and reached a point last November where both my brain and my body were bored with the routine and needed a jump-start. Yeah, the P90 infomercials provided one option, but I decided it was time to hire a personal trainer.

I started to observe some of the personal trainers at my gym and quickly saw what I did not want… bouncing, bubbly 20 year olds; trainers spending more time socializing and walking around than training, and trainers who seemed more concerned with their own body than their client’s.

On a vacation day during the holidays I attended a late morning class led by another personal trainer and by the end of the class, I had a feeling that this was a great match. We set up a test session, and my intuition was right.  I asked her to challenge me and “kick my but” and she has done just that for the past three months.

As a result of her coaching, I have been able to significantly increase the pace, the effort and the weight I use in my workouts. I have pushed myself much harder than ever before.  Here are some of my key learnings as a result of this experience:

1) Know What You Want Before You Get Started

Before I hired a trainer, I thought through which areas I wanted to focus on and what the desired outcomes were. I was then able to clearly articulate them to the trainer, which allowed her to design a specific program for me, which has yielded results.

Before trying to improve something, clearly define the areas in which you want to improve and the desired outcomes. Being specific allows you to design and implement highly targeted actions to achieve your outcomes.

2) Strategically Choose The Right Coach – The Right Expert

Working with the right boss or the right coach; one that you respect, has the right skills and experience, and one that you have chemistry with, is critical to successful change. If any of those pieces are missing, you will not reach your full potential.

3) Changing The How – Changes The What

After trying my “how” for years and reaching a plateau, I am now relying on the expert to design a new “how”, every time we work out together. I gave up control to gain more control in the long run.

I specifically set up out personal training sessions from 6AM to 7AM on Tuesday mornings, because I wanted to shake up my routine. Yes, it is painful getting to the gym that early and, yes, I am not quite awake until about ten minutes into the routine BUT the rest of the session is very productive and I feel fabulous the rest of the day.

Changing how and when I work out has changed the output – the results.

4) Ask For Help to Drive Up Accountability And Push Yourself Farther

When left to our own devices, it can be easy to give up before 5 more repetitions, or before we’ve truly solved the root cause of a problem. I’ve learned that if I try, I can use a 20 pound weight, instead of 10. If I push myself, I can do 50 squats instead of 20.  And, with my coach there by my side, I am more accountable and more motivated.

All of the techniques I described in this blog post are translatable to the office environment and can be used to improve your own personal capacity or productivity AND to improve your team’s productivity and capacity. Unless you change “the how”, you will not change “the what” or the outcomes. And, by involving the right experts or the right coaches, we will all be more successful.

How would you like to have Dr. Eric Gablehauser’s job? Dr. Eric Gablehauser is responsible for managing the Physics Department on the hit CBS situational comedy “The Big Bang Theory”. In other words, he is Sheldon Cooper’s boss. If you watch the show, you know that can be a challenge.

That is why I am writing this blog post. As an Operations Executive, I have often had the honor and privilege of managing technical teams. People who often had IQs so high that I thought they were in a high IQ society that is higher than Mensa, a group that a guy with my IQ had never even heard of.

Because I have led such teams, the issue I am going to discuss is this: “Is managing technical teams different than managing non-technical teams.”

All stereotypes aside, in my experience, managing technical teams is very similar to managing non-technical teams. The keys to managing both types of teams are getting to know the members of your team and understanding what is important to them, their strengths and weaknesses, what type of work they are passionate about and what type of work they don’t like to be involved in. Once you understand these issues, you should be able to articulate with them a definition of individual and team success. You can then lead your team toward a successful outcome.

In my experience, technical people can generally be segmented into two groups—creative and production. Here are some tips for managing these two types of people.

Managing Creative People

1. Always hire the best people you can. In my experience, high-quality people thrive on
   working with other top-notch people.
2. Create a collaborative environment where ideas and work product are mutually arrived
   at and not dictated. That said, you may still need to spell out and define the end result
   you are looking for.
3. Give your team the ability to work independently of you. Stay out of their way. Give them
   time to be creative and take initiative.
4. Tell your team “Why” and not “How”.
5. Teach them how to present their ideas and solutions to non-technical people.
6. Teach them about meeting customer needs, seeing ideas/solutions from a user’s point
   of view and making a profit. This may also entail teaching them the difference between
   a “way cool” idea and one that will meet customer expectations and make money.
7. Use customer project deadlines and requirements and the need to make a profit to set
   targets and goals. Do not waiver from these goals.
8. Focus on important issues like getting high-quality work done. This may mean being flexible on things like work hours, time spent in the office, dress code, etc
9. Set high expectations. Expect excellence. Give honest, direct and consistent feedback.
10. Treat your team members like adults. This means full disclosure of the business
    situation and always showing and expecting mutual respect.
11. Reward and celebrate success.
12. Manage management and customer expectations in light of the above.

Managing Production People

In my opinion, other than work hour scheduling and time spent in the office, the tips for managing Production People are the same as those for managing Creative People. That said, there are some major differences in the type of work done.

Technical Production People are generally accountable for making sure that systems and infrastructure work 100% of the time 24X7X365. For example, when people arrive at work, they expect their computers and systems to work. When customers visit the company’s Website it needs to work. In addition to reliability, these systems also need to be secure and responsive. In light of all this, I would add these tips to those spelled out above.

1. Set, measure and manage production standards (for example, system up-time rates) to
   exceed end user expectations
2. Make sure that your team is scheduled to work (or are on call) when the business needs
   them
3. Ensure that the team puts in place a planning process that ensures that the company’s
   infrastructure will meet the business’ capacity and business needs.
4. Ensure that you have a working business continuity plan and security program (both of
   which need to be internally and externally tested).

Managing technical people does not have to be the challenge most managers presume it to be. Unfortunately, as managers, we often look at technical people as stereotypes (like those on “The Big Bang Theory”). Technical people are people, just like non-technical people. They have individual strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes, fears and baggage, idiosyncrasies, families and friends, hobbies and non-work interests. They sleep and eat and live life.

In summary, deal with the members of your team as individuals, Get to know and understand them. Treat them like adults. Treat them like you would like to be treated. Be a good manager. Be a good leader. Encourage and push your people to go beyond their self-imposed limitations. Do all of these things and you’ll do a great job as a leader and your team will thrive.

Like all of leadership, it’s not always easy, but when your team’s goals and your organizational goals become one and the same, your team will achieve some amazing things.

About George McQuain, Guest Blogger
George has been described as a “100% Leader” a “Level 5 Leader”, an operations, turnaround and IT expert and a guy you can count on to get things done. Learn more:
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/georgemcquain
Leadership Blog: http://georgemcquain.blogspot.com/
Twitter: @GeorgeMcQuain1

To consistently meet or exceed our objectives, we must understand the business levers, i.e. the most important and specific set of activities that will enable our teams to be successful over the long term. We must coach our teams on the most appropriate, proven set of behaviors that will get us from point A to point B.

To define the right set of levers, you should consider these 6 steps:

1) Ask the right questions

• Which set of activities, in what order, will allow you to achieve your outcomes on time, on budget?
• Which set of activities do you have the most control over?
• Which activities will have the biggest impact both short term and long term?
• Which activities will be easiest and most realistic to reproduce consistently, over time?

2) Engage the right people

Directors and VPs usually have good ideas, but we must never stop there (in a conference room). Engage the front line managers and the people actually doing the work. They are closest to the action. They are the SMEs.

3) Look up, over and out

We must look externally, in other departments, in other companies and other industries. It is not always necessary to recreate the wheel.

4) Simplify

Providing team members with complex, hundred page manuals will not get results.  Simplify. Get the most important ideas down on a handful of pages. Less is more.

5) Be prescriptive

When you explain to someone exactly what you want them to do, you significantly increase the likelihood that they will be able to do it. There is no room for vagueness and ambiguity, when defining or communicating your critical levers.

6) Levers are not one size fits all

One you have identified the most important business objectives, determine which employee levels and roles will have the biggest influence on their achievement. Then, define levers of success for each role. For example, the levers to achieve your customer satisfaction survey goals will be different for Tech Support Analysts, Tech Support Engineers and Tech Support Managers.

After reading this post I hope that you agree…. levers are pretty darn important. Next time you meet with your teams about achieving department goals or you delegate a task to one of your direct reports, stop and ask yourself; Was I clever? Did we discuss the right lever(s)?

If you do, you will meet your goals and objectives faster, more consistently and set yourself up for success over the long term. Levers are cool.

You may also like these related posts:

• 5 key levers to productivity improvement… every day, By Doman Vaughan Consulting
• Balancing business levers, Customers Matter blog
• Just talking can improve business results, The Operations Blog