Managing the Software Support team I established SLAs and monthly reporting to create accountability, visibility and ownership.

My role: While managing two software development teams, I also inherited responsibility for the Software Support team. The team had had little guidance or direction, and were working ineffectively to respond to internal support tickets without any idea of their actual, or target, issue resolution times.

Process; The first thing I did was work with the team to establish tiers for issues and associated SLAs (service-level agreements), so everyone had buy-in and gave their support to our new targets. This was supplemented by performance monitoring and a new monthly report that I designed and circulated to the entire company, so our colleagues would have an understanding of the support issues being worked on. I was confident that if the company could see how many 100s of tickets were getting resolved each month, it would help create empathy and understanding - an often needed perspective when individuals get frustrated by delays in their own issue resolution. I also helped improve the efficiency of the team by writing templated replies for common issues that established proactive communication, and managed the expectations of those needing support.

Outcomes: A new process for assigning tickets, combined with the new tiered SLAs which created time-sensitivity, saw more tickets getting worked on each week. The visibility of the monthly report also created a sense of accountability and pride because the team had visibility of, and could celebrate, when more issues were resolved within their SLAs. This monthly report also evolved to become a communication channel where common troubleshooting tips were shared, and we presented the details of more complex issues. We set up reporting to ensure that the data for the monthly report was available as the template needed, and I was then able to hand the reporting over to the Support staff who revelled in the chance to promote their work.

Key Takeaway:

Any team will only be as good as the things they are held accountable to. Without any targets or reporting it was easy for this Support team to lose track of their progress and let standards slip.