Balancing project work against support

[steinooo]

I'm an IT manager, everywhere I've worked I've had a battle to maintain BAU support whilst project managers try to use my team of engineers to work on their projects, Create new systems, install new stuff etc.

The best state I've been in organisationally is keeping a track in a basic excel spreadsheet of which engineer is working on which project, including working on our own stuff (upgrading IT systems to keep up to date etc) and refusing engineers to project teams unless they can argue with senior management that their project is more important than another project.

I denote IT stuff which cannot move, e.g. working on replacing SSL certificates which are due to expire, then I refuse the project team that engineer for that period of time.

I can't be the only one who's had this struggle, I'm curious as to how you've tackled this problem, what works for you?

 

[steinooo]

BAU and SLAs come above all else. In relaity though it's not always as black and white as that.

I think it's quite a common problem and I've been at two places now where they have broken out into two seperate teams for build and run.

That's one thing I'm tempted to do. It's then a black or white matter for the project/build resource as to whether they're available or not.

 

[steinooo]

Should have a service desk team and an engineering team, unless your company is tiny.

Engineering should only do BAU if there is no project work, or as last resort if service desk is struggling.

Reality is very different to this in most places though.

I do have a service desk too doing bau, but I'm mainly referring to 3rd line server guys who help projects by creating services, integrating services etc. They also have important bau to do like ensuring servers don't fill up, watching for unusual CPU usage, checking backups, testing DR etc

 

[steinooo]

It doesn't answer the question but why do you have 3rd line guys making sure servers don't fill up, checking CPU usage etc. - that should be handled by a monitoring platform that has sane alerts set.

Same with replacing SSL certs, it should all be scriptable and if it isn't then you need to work towards using CAs and services that can have things like SSL cert renewal automated so that the load on staff reduces over time.

Generally speaking, your service desk team (excluding maybe team lead/managers) should be aiming to get away from the service desk, and it's better for your company if they achieve that by getting promoted away into more of an engineering role, and if that engineering role involves getting dragged back onto support duties on a fairly regular basis then they will start to look elsewhere for that promotion.

I agree with your service desk point but don't you agree with the need for BAU 3rd line? Like doing stuff 1st and 2nd couldn't do

 

[steinooo]

Yeah basically. I know if I was looking at jobs and what was basically a deployment engineer (the closest guess I can make really for what you’re doing) was also getting tasked with making sure a servers hard drive wasn’t filling up I would start to wonder how much of a dead-end that role was likely to be career wise.

I’ve not worked anywhere that the internal IT team and the customer-facing engineers/consultants are the same pool of people, it’s a bit weird.

I think the source of confusion is perhaps that you're talking about a managed service provider. I am describing my customers as internal staff at the company I work for. The public are my companies "real" customers.

 

[steinooo]

Refreshing reading this. Glad others are out there thinking/experiencing similar.

The team I work in originally was tiny so it was just firefighting and frustrating. Still small compared to huge companies out there but proportionally unless you have a bloated abundance of IT resources, there will always be a struggle to cover BAU yet deliver projects. If you can strike a balance then you have done well.

Between covering for holiday/absence, and churn if people leave you can blink and time has flown.

That's what I'm trying to figure out; I'm sure someone must have cracked it who can give some pointers.

At the moment I'm adding loads of contingency in the tasks the project managers set and keeping 1 (ideally 2) staff out of the project rota completely to focus on BAU And it's greatly improved. The problem I've had Previously comes when the BAU staff dont have time to do the stuff which keeps the lights on as they're busy with projects (which always take longer than the pm thinks) like full up disks, renew SSL certificates, upgrade from old operating systems etc