Institutional Knowledge

Overall, a very good presentation. Geoff’s environment at Wayne sounded similar to Chico’s, with much of the same interesting politics and user behavior. Much of what he discussed are things we cover in one way or another at Chico, although I found quite a bit of value in hearing it again as it helped me grasp some of the nuances that pointed to areas that, even though Student Computing performs satisfactorily in them, are always in need of improvement. I’ll get to those in a bit.

A couple of the introductory points caught my eye:

• Training someone is as much about training yourself to work with that person as it is actually training that person to do their job.
• “It’s not who your boss is, but whose boss you are.” (This is an interesting counterpart to something we talk a lot about in Chico — that we work for the people that report to us, not the other way around.)

There was also some discussion of keeping an eye on student staff for those who step-up and become de facto “mid-level leaders”. This is something I think Student Computing does well, and hearing it from someone else was affirming.

Geoff’s first step to taming the help desk topic was “Taming Yourself”: dressing non-casual, thinking before speaking, consciously writing emails (as opposed to “blurting” them out), and reading the situation for its context. All excellent advice and definitely worth hearing again and again.

The next step focused on planning and training. Again, the similarities of Geoff’s environment to ours made much of this something we hear regularly in Chico, such as hiring and training to fill specific organizational needs and gaps. Two points, however, addressed areas where Student Computing can do much better:

1. Assess training needs of an applicant prior to extending an offer and hiring. This speaks to the need for us, after deciding to extend an offer of employment, to take the additional step of reviewing an applicant’s qualifications and interview performance and essentially coming up with a customized training plan (built on trainings we already provide) for the new hire. Currently, we have a pretty broad, “one-size-fits-all” approach to training new hires.
2. Setting the organization’s ground rules at the hiring. I’ve often referred to the “lapses” in the execution of the small duties of the student employees (such as checking the lab for food) as “constant battles”, meaning that they come up again and again, semester after semester. Our approach to this has always been to reiterate the necessity of performing these duties in staff meetings, in email, and then in follow-ups by walking around and checking up. Clearly, a pro-active approach of laying the ground rules before someone ever sets foot at the helpdesk can help, both in preventing these lapses as well as giving supervisory staff a “clear moment” (e.g. “remember when you were hired…”) to refer to when these lapses occur.

Geoff also mentioned three acronyms that are worth delving into further:

1. HDI (Help Desk Institute), “the world’s largest membership association for the service and support industry.”
2. ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), “a framework of best practice approaches intended to facilitate the delivery of high quality information technology (IT) services.”
3. MBWA (Management By Walking Around): I first heard this acronym at the ResNet conference in 2003 but had completely forgotten about it. It is definitely an important facilitator of the “dynamic training” that happens at a helpdesk — mentoring, impromptu Q&A, observing work, etc.

Links and miscellaneous:

• Wayne State’s C&IT Help Desk
• A great set of del.icio.us bookmarks Geoff put together just for this session.
• Wayne State uses KnowledgeBuilder as a helpdesk knowledgebase.
• He referred to the helpdesk organization as a “Participatory Dictatorship”. Although I think “dictatorship” is a bit harsh, I agree with the “participatory” part. Perhaps “Participatory Autocracy”? Or how about “Participatory Oligarchy”?