Project management headache!

shifty_uk

shifty_uk

shifty_uk

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Hi guys, not sure which section this should be in. I'm hoping to pick your brains as a lot of you will work in technology, IT, software, services, I thought I'd pose the question to the community how do you or your company manage your workflow?

I've grown my company now to over 10 members of staff with 30+ clients and reached a stage where I'm struggling with internal project management.

We use 2 separate paid for web services, one project management tool and one ticketing system for logging support.

Right now all support requests come through the ticketing system as they should however, where the issue lies is we have a number of larger clients who we do ongoing work for across all disciplines. Each of these clients have different departments, franchises etc who all have team members. These team members are emailing my team members directly for task requests of varying urgencies. So, for example one client has 5 departments with 2 points of contact each, each of these then requires a mixture of support, feature request, creative, marketing, etc etc so my talented team have became glorified receptionists answering emails all day!

If we switch to solely a ticketing system then I can't manage the workload for the whole team! I can't say, this programmer should be working on this project, this feature request etc on a particular day and can't prioritise.

I'm losing the will to live!

What are you guys using in your companies/businesses? :)
 
sort of similar situation where i work - our parent company are rolling out new intercompany software, previously if we came across any bugs/problems etc we would just send a skype message or email to the relevant person. that has recently been stopped as the dev/IT team were getting pulled from pillar to post and often the wrong person was having email/skype requests land at their toes and it got to the point they didn't what to work on and when (multiple subsiduaries worldwide all skyping and emailing so understandable that it became unmanageable)

was all moved over to jira, we raise a ticket and decide ourselves the priority (it requires a degree of honesty on the person raising the jira ticket that they aren't classing a 'nice to have feature' as urgent) then someone at the other end assigns the ticket to the correct person and depending on the level of urgency indicates how quickly it is dealt with. it's only once the ticket is raised and assigned that communication between the person that raised the ticket and the assignee begins (initaited by the assignee only if further coms are needed)

no idea if that would work for you but it has made a world of difference here. issues get fixed quicker and from chatting with the dev/IT at our HQ they are a shedload less stressed and seem to be able to respond quicker, generally.
 
Get your clients to manage the priorities themselves.
Charge more for urgent tickets and less for low priority tickets.
 
I think that if you've allocated a member of staff to work with a particular customer on a current project then it's fine for them to communicate directly about that project.

But anything else should be a ticket. Tickets are not just for traditional support they are for any request for service that doesn't relate to a current open project.

So you'd have your clients coming directly to named members of staff in relation to authorised/funded current projects, if the (internal) staff need help to prioritise this work then you may need someone on a project management role.

Meanwhile all new / unrelated / independent service requests are raised as tickets and prioritised and dealt with accordingly. It's up to you whether you assign priority internally or allow the customer to do it, but this would be documented in your SLAs and you'd need to do something to dissuade every service request from being flagged as critical/urgent.

The hardest thing about this is getting your front line staff to say "No I'm sorry, I'm assigned to something else, you'll need to open a ticket". We all know how easy it is to drop a quick mail asking for a favour here and there when you've got a named contact but this under the radar stuff can become a real drain on resources.

Edit: Jira, Trello, Confluence are the better tools I've used if you want to compare them to what you've currently got.
 
Thekwango said:
sort of similar situation where i work - our parent company are rolling out new intercompany software, previously if we came across any bugs/problems etc we would just send a skype message or email to the relevant person. that has recently been stopped as the dev/IT team were getting pulled from pillar to post and often the wrong person was having email/skype requests land at their toes and it got to the point they didn't what to work on and when (multiple subsiduaries worldwide all skyping and emailing so understandable that it became unmanageable)

was all moved over to jira, we raise a ticket and decide ourselves the priority (it requires a degree of honesty on the person raising the jira ticket that they aren't classing a 'nice to have feature' as urgent) then someone at the other end assigns the ticket to the correct person and depending on the level of urgency indicates how quickly it is dealt with. it's only once the ticket is raised and assigned that communication between the person that raised the ticket and the assignee begins (initaited by the assignee only if further coms are needed)

no idea if that would work for you but it has made a world of difference here. issues get fixed quicker and from chatting with the dev/IT at our HQ they are a shedload less stressed and seem to be able to respond quicker, generally.
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Sounds familiar, I presume this is all internal? I've had a look at Jira and for the size of our business and the way we manage things, on a client basis rather than strictly project basis, it seems a bit too much. We are currently using Wrike and Zendesk. Even Wrike is a bit too much for what we need on that side of things.

lurkio said:
Hire a proper project manager to deal with this for you
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I thought I had one :o:o
Nazbit said:
I think that if you've allocated a member of staff to work with a particular customer on a current project then it's fine for them to communicate directly about that project.

But anything else should be a ticket. Tickets are not just for traditional support they are for any request for service that doesn't relate to a current open project.

So you'd have your clients coming directly to named members of staff in relation to authorised/funded current projects, if the (internal) staff need help to prioritise this work then you may need someone on a project management role.

Meanwhile all new / unrelated / independent service requests are raised as tickets and prioritised and dealt with accordingly. It's up to you whether you assign priority internally or allow the customer to do it, but this would be documented in your SLAs and you'd need to do something to dissuade every service request from being flagged as critical/urgent.

The hardest thing about this is getting your front line staff to say "No I'm sorry, I'm assigned to something else, you'll need to open a ticket". We all know how easy it is to drop a quick mail asking for a favour here and there when you've got a named contact but this under the radar stuff can become a real drain on resources.

Edit: Jira, Trello, Confluence are the better tools I've used if you want to compare them to what you've currently got.
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Some do communicate directly but I don't like it, the team are more efficient away from emails. A single point of contact for clients is the right way in my mind. I agree with you, tickets should be more. Unfortunately that's just the way the business has grown, ticketing was done through support system and job requests came through director level then management level.

As above, we're running Wrike and Zen.

Time tracking is another mess I won't bore you with :p

It's good to hear everyones point of views though
 
I work in R & D, there are about 40 staff and 3 full time project managers + 2 assistants to keep thing moving well
 
I work for a company with ~27 people, four full time devs and two support. We have a lot of customer and end-user interaction. We use Jira to manage developer tasks, Zendesk to manage customer tickets, Trello for very high level management overviews (basically a very very simplified gantt replacement, because I told management there's no way we're going to update a gantt for you :o) and Slack for internal communication. it seems to work pretty well.

Zendesk, Jira, Trello and Slack can all be easily integrated together for free. E.g., it's one click to raise a Jira ticket from a Zendesk ticket, and when you close the Jira ticket Zendesk can be notified it's fixed. Trello cards can be linked to Jira tickets to see task status as well, and Slack can automatically ping when someone raises/updates a ticket etc. So you could set-up a dedicated channel for support requests or whatever.


When someone responds to a direct email that either they can't help with, or that requires a bit of time to solve, why not just have them cc in the support desk? That way if they can't deal with it then it can be reassigned to someone else, or if they deal with you can still see the work getting tracked as support time. With a bit of time your customers may then learn they may as well just contact support directly.
 
I don't run my own company but I'll share my views having held a few roles within a much larger tech firms.

shifty_uk said:
If we switch to solely a ticketing system then I can't manage the workload for the whole team! I can't say, this programmer should be working on this project, this feature request etc on a particular day and can't prioritise.
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You shouldn't need to, you probably need to delegate. Specifically for a dev team and with regards to ongoing maintenance items requiring a fix you might get a business analyst to manage the priorities, allocate things to different developers etc... based on priorities set by account management (or perhaps in a smaller firm you) I used to do this. For a big enhancement/upgrade to your existing system (whatever it is you offer) then a PM or product owner (depending partly on the methodology you use) would tend to handle it, presumably with only 10 in the company then you perhaps handle the role of product owner? For support items you can have a team lead/support manager move stuff around, but no reason why you can't have the support guys pick stuff up as it comes in and prioritise their own lists - the team lead only needs to do a bit of rebalancing every so often.

Essentially the e-mailing stuff really ought to stop (you're going to have a harder time figuring out what people have been working on too if some of it is ad hoc stuff via e-mails), get everything coming in via your single ticketing system, get the clients to prioritise stuff that they log and give clear criteria for what is a severity 1, 2, 3 4 issue etc.. (get your support guys to re-classify stuff if reported incorrectly) - you might need to reclassify low priority items if they approach SLA deadlines too. Whoever looks after your support team can re-jig the backlog the support guys have.

Re your clients - this is where account management (or perhaps you at the moment) can step in with a high level overview of their priorities, you can send say their top items to the dev or support manager(s) as required... there might well be 5 diff departments and a coupe of points of contact but presumably there is only one place to send the invoice to and you as the higher level guy perhaps want to have a weekly or whatever meeting with the higher up person at the client where they can specify their top items they need looking at.

There is a secondary criteria that account management (or probably you in this instance) might set and that is to prioritise the clients too - for whatever reason you might need to give more priority to certain clients (maybe a brand new client or a client you've let down recently or are worried about losing etc..) and this can be a factor to consider for the support team members, team lead, whoever allocates stuff in the dev team(s) etc... You could set this weekly too.

Bottom line is I think you probably need to step back, you certainly don't need to be involved in allocating every single item, you need people to manage themselves and you take the higher level view and just get involved in pushing forwards higher priority stuff and making more strategic calls like client X is a priority this week etc... let the people below you sort out the details in response to that.
 
Jira and Jira Service Desk will take care of this for you configured correctly but I would say that since I run the world’s largest Atlassian Platinum partner!
 
yeah jira here too! used jira in previous place and as long as you setup your workflows, projects etc properly you'll be good.

depends how many users you need really, higher number is crazy expensive but atlassian cloud might an option?
 
randomshenans said:
Chuck us some licenses then will you! :D PLSSSSS!
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Chuck, no. Even I'm not allowed to run our production systems on anything other than paid for licenses. However I can get you a price below what you pay on Atlassian's website or an even bigger discount if you use any of our add-ons. Trust me if interested.
 
Although I don't run my own business I've run big IT programmes with multiple countries and releases that will have had similar challenges.

My view is that this isn't a software problem, it's a process problem and maybe a resource problem .JIRA is great, but won't help at all if you don't have a good progress in place and maybe a dedicated PM for your clients to contact to capture requests and prioritise work. Id think about the different types of requests and route them differently
 
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