Climbing the mountain during an avalanche...
Managing a tech support team has two dimensions;
– the daily flow of issues and emergencies
– improving the team skills, process, tools and knowledge resources.
The daily issues can be considered the avalanche. Those boulders need to be handled! Improving the team’s ability to handle that avalanche effectively is the mountain that you climb.
Often, the team is too exhausted from dodging, stopping and redirecting those boulders, they can never make progress climbing the mountain.
This is where fractional support management can help. It starts with measurement, getting a standard and meaningful set of KPIs that establish a good performance baseline.
The next step is analyzing the data, and discussing any insights on problem areas with the team and users. Planning and executing specific strategies to address the problem areas that will help get the most leverage in improving the KPIs is the final step. This will make progress up the mountain. The progress will be revealed by improved KPI values.
Fractional support managers have the benefit of being outside the day to day, bring an external set of eyes and years of experience to help formulate and execute these plans.