The boss had made up his mind – my department will be able to work remotely to support in various situations such as year end reporting or during Christmas. It was a bit of an empty threat as most issues that would come up were something that required IT assistance to correct. Not difficult things, it could be as simple as delete that bad datafile or re-run that process. I like IT, some of my best friends are in IT, but it tends to be difficult to reach anyone from that group outside of normal business hours when these types of issues occur.
The command came from on-high so I tried to connect from home and was pleasantly surprised that most of my daily activities worked just fine. I did encounter a few small things that didn’t work that were important enough to get fixed. So I filled out the form on the intranet which although convenient didn’t really allow for much in the way of details. In a nutshell, I could give my details and a small description of the problem and attach a single document.
I tried to describe everything and the attachments had screen-shots showing all the errors. The way support works at my company is not very different than trying to report a PC problem to the manufacturer. It involves emails, no telephone calls unless they call you.
I don’t want to say that my boss is impatient but that is the impression he gives so I had to show him where the process was breaking down. The first time it was ticket about two connectivity issues and the second ticket was almost the same as the first but it included a new issue.
Every week or so I created a ticket asking for information or status on my original tickets but this didn’t seem to make any progress. Finally about five weeks later someone actually stopped by and looked at all three errors and could see that indeed the program didn’t work. He then called other specific support groups for each issue but all he managed to do during that hour was update my company profile permissions, which didn’t solve anything.
I thought his efforts were benign until a few weeks later when I actually needed my laptop, now nothing worked remotely. It took half a day and a few phone calls before it was working as it had previously – sigh.
I told the boss that he would need to escalate this through other channels and he said he would do so. I was quite surprised the next afternoon to receive a contact from support who wanted more information. The questions are almost exactly like talking to a large PC manufacturer in the sense that most of the information was either already provided or the question didn’t apply.
What I found to be really annoying was this was not the support person, but rather the situation. They sent someone who did not understand any of my issues nor who could actually make any corrections to my environment. She only wanted to gather more information for the rest of the support group who had not to this point even seen my request.
I suggested I could try to gather up some of this information but my account is that of a normal user and most this was not available to me such as which IP addresses of the destination computers or what ports am I using. My support person did have a solution to how I could get this information, she suggested that I fill out another support ticket asking for that information.
I guess if this was a soccer game, it would be support 1 user 0. The only thing that has happened is that two months have passed and no issues have been solved. I guess that my boss doesn’t have quite the power I had thought.