IT Jobs and Call logging

anything I don't mind

anything I don't mind

anything I don't mind

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I am sure loads here work in IT. Is there anything that you hate more working in IT than call logging/SLA and itil non sense. Where i work I have four bosses, four people that look over the call logs and complain at the smallest things. I have one technical boss, one helpdesk supervisor, they work for the same company. The client where we are based, law firm, has a finance director, they employ an external consultant to oversee the oursourcing company that i work for. We have a weekly meeting where the consultant goes over CLOSED calls and moans about the smallest of things. I am employed as a 1st/2nd line guy but am expected to do 3rd line work. We have full access to the servers and are expected to maintain the entire systems and printers and support everything from outlook to checkpoint. We also do projects like software upgrades. I just had a review meeting with the supervisor and my tech boss and they moaning about the amount of calls that we log and said they are going to bring in SLA's and that we need to start putting calls on hold.

The client never moans, we work hard and do a good job (me and another guy, same position). I can deal with stupid users, irate users, rude users. But when it comes to logging outlook problems and someone asking me for batteries i draw the line. Anyone fed up with this waste of time logging ?

What other types of jobs do you have to log every single incident, police, ambulance ?

Why can't i just do my job and fix problems without having them go over everything and have an uninformed opinion. :(
 
Don't worry, you only have to do a few years on helpdesk before you can move on to bigger and better things, unless you get lucky in the meantime!
 
Can't say that I have any issues with working in a, nominally, ITIL process based environment.

Logging things does tend to make things easier to keep track of and able to refer to things for solutions ....
 
you are in a low level position you have no choice but to do as you are told...

we now have to do more paperwork than work, to the point the service we can offer is seriously effected...

it took me 2 hours the other day to get the paper work done to reboot a live server... - fair enough you say... HOWEVER the server had CRASHED.. the whole system was down and no one could use the system (it was also the only system on that server)

the paperwork is signed off by two people who know NOTHING about IT...

(well I waited 2 hours the jsut did it as I got fed up waiting for the paperwork to be done)
 
I went from having to log every detail to only having to log core systems details to the level I feel relevant. The joys of going from 2nd line to systems admin :D

You'll get there in a few years though, just bear with it!
 
When i was working at an investment bank it was a change management nightmare. I was doing first line and a change of phone number request would come through, would take me a whole 5 seconds if i had access. Would take 4 days, after passing it to the AD department.

I would not consider my job entry level, It is some what a sys admin job because we have full access to systems and a lot of responsibility.

It is just a waste of time, i understand some calls needs to be logged when you are investigating them or they are going to need updates etc. So you do not forgot, but just logging so that the stats go up and the supervisor can then show some graphs and apparently justify our job (realy justify his job).
 
Khaaan! said:
I went from having to log every detail to only having to log core systems details to the level I feel relevant. The joys of going from 2nd line to systems admin :D
Click to expand...

+1

So glad I don't have to deal with SOX anymore, now it's just ISO9001 :x
 
edscdk said:
you are in a low level position you have no choice but to do as you are told...

we now have to do more paperwork than work, to the point the service we can offer is seriously effected...

it took me 2 hours the other day to get the paper work done to reboot a live server... - fair enough you say... HOWEVER the server had CRASHED.. the whole system was down and no one could use the system (it was also the only system on that server)

the paperwork is signed off by two people who know NOTHING about IT...

(well I waited 2 hours the jsut did it as I got fed up waiting for the paperwork to be done)
Click to expand...

If the quality of service is being affected by the process then the process is wrong.

In the above situation we would rebooted off the back of the incident ticket to restore service and only have gone through a change process if we needed to arrange hardware engineer access to site.
 
edscdk said:
small company with in house support is what you want...
Click to expand...

Or small support company.

I had a choice between 1st line support in a large corporate and joining a tiny team of, at the time, just 3 people. By going for the latter I was configuring firewalls, clusters and configuring exchange etc within the first month. Of course there was also PC builds, buying licenses, supporting Office and all the other crap, but better that than being lost in a large team of call loggers.

Go small first, then go LARGE :)
 
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Yup, When I started my last job we were so under staffed and under managed we didn't log very much but we were happy, motivated and got through a lot of work. Once the company started growing they started putting in more procedures and giving us pathetic tasks because it was all getting rather political with other parts of the company. This meant more work but the new procedures also meant it took longer, and because the management were based else where they had no idea what was going on and never took our advice.

In the end I was logging everything, every time someone asked me a question I logged it under advice, so I spent all day logging tickets and doing very little work. Looking at the stats I was meeting the required work load so they couldn't complain but the bad management from the directors really ****ed off the staff. One month before the end I had a meeting with my team leader (who had only been there about 8 months), told him what was going on and said IT support will collapse if nothing is done. A month later I quit, IT boss quit and another guy just walked out, a few weeks after that the main IT guy also left. IT support were left with 2 guys with a years experience between them running a whole college, 5 remote offices and the company's head office. Saying "I told you so" never felt so good :D

MW
 
"I can not upload photos to facebook."
"I would like web cams for all our home workers, I think it will help with health and safety."
 
Number of reasons why it's good to log everything, one of the main one's being it provides evidence to show you are doing something.

Nothing being logged, no trail of work done, why are we employing you again? :)

As for going over closed calls, how do you expect anything to improve if you don't assess what's already been done?

Yes it's a ball ache, no one likes doing it, but there are reasons for it.
 
I was going to reply in a long winded way about why it's necessary in an outsourced/contractual basis, but i'll just reply 'MONEY'! It's a way to prove the amount of work you are doing for the company so the company gets it's $$$ and if you cant prove you were doing it then your company gets hit with penalties. Simples. (And if you think it's small fry, i worked on a contract where a failure of a 1hr SLA was a $1m service penalty!)

A quick example of a reason why in the last contract i worked for in outsourcing, every LMAC (lightweight move/add/change) which was moving 1 PC, setting up 1 user account etc was £17 to the company, every IMAC (Implementation, Move, Add, Change) so things like moving more than 10pc's and less than 20 was £140. Installing a server was £6000 which included mon-fri 9x5 support for 1yr (I installed around 50 servers in my time there) if they wanted 24x7 4hr fix support on servers just think of a number from 1-9 and make sure there are at least 4 zero's on the end (sometimes 5!)

And that was all on top of a contract that was £32 per month per user for 'incident' support (around 2000 users on my site).
 
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