Balderdash

So I’m an IT guy and I now ‘manage’ IT guys. I got my start with my current employer as essentially a customer service representative. Here is what I learned:

Service matters.

• Customers aren’t always reasonable, sometimes they are downright irrational, but they’re people who need help.
• Frustration and anxiety are often a result of an ambiguous or difficult to understand process. By working with people who are frustrated you may find some big holes in what you thought were logical processes.
• Showing them some empathy, consideration and human decency is how you get people to come around, out the tree what have you. IT is a business with notoriously bad service. Frankly by showing an ounce of humility and understanding people think we’re super stars.  
• No matter the technical expertise a jerk is going to give your department a bad name. It might be time to find a well-balanced geek. Good IT people manage themselves to some extent.

How can you specifically improve your IT department’s standing in your company?

• Don’t impose a new policy without advertising it to your user base.
  • Test it out with a handful of supporters and known detractors.
  • Try to both address objections and make clear why the change should happen.
• Did you put something extra into that last help ticket?
  • Don’t just fix a missing mapped drive clean out the temporary internet files.
  • Make sure you clear some of the junk out of the user startup folder.
  • When a user finds that a machine that runs better visits from IT might seem, useful.
• When was the last time you replaced some of the aging equipment on the floor?
  • When the printer is older than your first born it is long overdue for replacement.
• Did you ask some users how you might be able to assist with their work?
  • You’d be surprised how many people are trying to do things that would take 10 minutes in Excel. Run training.
• Talk to people.
• Make friends with your fellow service departments.
  • Finance loves predictable equipment expenditure in capital budgets. They like budget to actuals that come close to expected expenses.
    • Did you not understand that? Take a finance course and buy a book.
    • Love HR. These people know when folks are leaving, when more people are coming, and they have an inside edge into when the company events are going on.
      • Company softball games are good times for server upgrades. You’re not really good at sports anyway.

Take it from me and soon you’ll be measuring your service levels in thank you notes and bottles of wine. IT is not all computers and servers after all.