Balancing project work against support

Soldato
Joined
15 Sep 2009
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Manchester
Agreed on the use of timesheets, they're a necessary evil at times - we are a small specialist team here in a company of 10,000+ with huge swathes of specialties, we are a platform team who do BAU and Project work for the platform. My role is technically 100% project, but there are always various BAU escalations which the non-seniors struggle with, and part of the senior role is to develop them and assist. We also run Service Provider stuff, so there's external factors too, lots of design and architecture workshops, this is all tracked so we can see where time is being spent. Our main problem is overload at the moment, we're multiple businesses in multiple sectors due to aggressive acquisitions and keeping on top of things can be a challenge, but we're also aggressively recruiting.
 
Soldato
Joined
3 Dec 2002
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3,996
Location
Groovin' @ the disco
....

Do you ever have external parties/contractors; 4th line backup to share experience of?

Oh where to begin lol...
I've worked on both sides of the fence and again it depends on the size of your org and the size of the org that you are dealing with.

Plan for the worst and hope for the best! an exit strategy should be part of business continuity/disaster recovery.

Give them detailed tenders/requirements so that they are fully aware of what is required/how it should work.
The need to come back with a proposal with a statement of work and list of dependencies for them to fullfil the proposal.

Setup:
KPIs.
Timelines/keystones.
Named contacts on both sides.
Scope of work
Roles and responsibilities on both sides.

If it's a long term; regular meetings one for tech and one for management, it's easiler to cancel a meeting than it is to arrange one when things go south.

It's best to get all the nasties out of the way and to keep business and process/tech separate, the tech meeting are there soley to resolve process/tech issues and discuss short term improvements. From my experience it's best to keep it to a small number of people; 1:1 if possible, if the system/process is critical and then maybe an additional staff per said as backup. This will allow you to have a tech lead/specialist in your company, one voice that they have to listen to. I've experienced the too many cooks issue a few times, people get confused, time gets wasted.. feelings get hurt. But someone needs a tech overview of the project/system.

It doesn't mean that your other staff won't have their chance to give their input/feedback, that's what internal meetings are for. That person gatekeeps the information and queries, onboarding/upskill other staff when the time is correct, assigns tasks to other staff/teams/departments, reaches out to other department/teams when required, asks the questions to the 3rd party. You don't want half your team disappearing to a meeting everyday for a project nor do you want your 3rd party getting upset having to answer silly questions all the time.

I've seen bills for unrequired/incompatible work as "someone" in our company has asked them to do something, that we had another project starting soon for a service that would work with another project done by a different team that was about to complete.

Having named contacts, set roles and responsibilities on your side should help with time management.

If a third liner is moaning that they are not getting enough exciting work and have to do too much BAU; maybe the areas/systems/processes that they are responsibly for are being neglected and should be reviewed either for improvements/replacement or removing; or that they are that good at their job ;)

On the other hand; if a third liner is moaning that they have too much work. This could be a sign of too many changes in a short period in the areas that they are responsible for. The question needs to be asked if that many changes in one area is good? what happens if an unknown problem occur and there's been sereval projects that could have caused it...

For cross-skilling; they can rotate.. just becase a person is lead on a AD project or in charage of AD, doesn't mean that they do everything concerned with AD. Lesser AD projects could be handed to other staff for upskilling (if they have the interest). All 3rd level should have the skills to handle a AD ticket; or at least ask and learn to do it.

The management meetings are there to discuss preformace, future vision/long term goals, pricing etc.. again internal staff should be able to feedback during internal meetings. We all know someone (normally me lol) that moans about everything, it's up to the budget owner/service owner repping the company; if they want to feedback to 3rd party company once took 3 days to response to an email and as a tech I don't want to sit there listening about pounds per device talk.

From my experince 3rd parties staff get a way with a lot of stuff that internal staff wouldn't get away with.. just because their are 3rd party doesn't mean that they don't have to follow your company policies, some policies are there for legal and regulation reasons.

They may not know better; I've experienced a 3rd party 1st liner (not me) make a unauthourised change that caused a major incident on an estate of 6000 devices. I've asked for stuff to be 3rd partied out simply because I don't have the time or it was too costly for me to do/manage it at the level that is required, doesn't mean that it's not worth me managing at a higher level or giving it overall tech direction.

They certainly don't have the "business knowledge" of what will wash with senior management and stake holders and what won't, I couldn't give two monkeys when I was working for a MSP; I didn't have to face the staff. I was there to offer different tech solutions an issue; it was upto the the company which one they ran with.

Like any relationship there's give and take.. good times and bad.. but always have an exit strategy; you don't want to be stuck in a marriage of convenience and bent over!

Exit strategy may come in useful, like when all the tech call centres in India was closed due to covid, like now when there's a silicone storage, or the company you get temp staff has a shortage of people.
 
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