It's not the organization, it's the people!

The BBQ Pit
1

Today we had a meeting at work, a software company where I do support. Well, actually I was at home because it is my day off and I had to call in for the meeting. Anyway, part of the meeting was about our customers and how some of them are getting upset because their cases are not being resolved in a timely mannor.

The company is fairly small. Usually 3 to 5 support people on shift at a time. We have three shifts, A is the morning shift, B is swing and C is overnight. Since last December we have lost 7 people from support. For every 3.5 people who have left one has been brought in as a replacement (In other words we got 2 new people). The shift I work, the B shift has lost 4 people. The B shift has not recieved any replacements.

Now to the rant.

The B shift is getting absoluely killed. We have been short on people since December. On Thursdays and Fridays the B shift has two people on shift, me and someone else. Last Friday I picked up 23 cases (we used to have 4 people on that shift, we now have 2). Each case takes roughly a half hour. Sometimes more. Sometimes a lot more*. Even if all the cases took 30 minutes that is still 11.5 hours worth of work. I work 8 hours a shift. So I get cases that I do not fix because I don’t have the time. They get backlogged and they get backlogged in my name. Once you take a case you own it until the case is resolved. Due to this I have 115 backlogged cases.

Today I found out that they are not going to hire any more people for my shift. They are also not going to reschedule anyone for our shift. They are not going to hire anyone. Instead what is going to happen is each person is going to be assigned a property. Once assigned a property we are to follow up every backlogged case for that property. We are supposed to call the person listed on the case and resolve the issue. This is supposed to solve our backlog problem. This is the third meeting we have had about the backlog problem, the third solution offered by management and it is the third idea that isn’t going to work.

It isn’t going to work because WE DON’T HAVE ENOUGH PEOPLE! Reshuffling the cases is not going to make up for the LACK OF PEOPLE!

No matter how you move the cases around it ain’t gonna do a fucking thing because the root of the problem is that we have too much work and not enough people.

I felt like screaming ‘YOU NEED TO HIRE PEOPLE YOU FUCKTARDS!’ into the phone during the meeting today but I was able to restrain myself.

Tonight I am polishing up my resume.

It’s a bummer because I liked the company until they decided that we have enough people even though it is obvious to every non-mangement person in the company** that we despreately need more people.

Slee

*I had a down property, they couldn’t do anything, that took 5 hours to fix. This doesn’t happen often, about once a month, but when it does happen we don’t have enough people to handle the rest of the cases. Down properties usually take an hour to an hour and a half. When a property goes down it is an emergency. It HAS to be fixed.

**The receptionist wrote an email to the VP the other day stating that the B shift badly needs people. The RECEPTIONIST!

2

It’s typical. The bigshots will toss a few “say nothing” phrases about empowerment, thinking outside the box, etc, and expect you to do everything with no staff or resources. To fail to do so is a lack of teaming on your part. Nevermind that the managers are not managing a damn thing. It will all be your fault anyway. Keep working on the resume. Your company is in trouble, and you owe them no more loyalty than they would give you (gone with thewind to shore up the bottom line while boss man gets a bonus).

3

For a company that size to lose so many people is unthinkable. Why are they leaving? I second the idea that your company is in serious trouble.

4

Actually the company is doing pretty good. The support department is fucked but sales-wise the company is doing ok. Though I do believe that unless they get the support department working correctly (read hire people) we are going to start losing customers.

The support department…god I don’t even know where to begin so I’ll just list shit.

Documentation. It doesn’t exist. I recently had a call from a property about a problem they were having with a membership module. I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. Turns out that we wrote a bunch of code for this property because they asked (and paid) for it. The problem is that only the developer knows how this particular part of the software is supposed to work. To fix the problem I had to first figure out what the hell it was supposed to do. Another time I had to call a developer at midnight to find out how to run a tool. I figured out that the tool needed to be run on a database but there was no documentation on a) where to find the tool o b)how to use it.

Information management. One of the things we do is connect to properties to fix stuff. It’s one of the things I like about the job in that we don’t have to do much explanation/walk throughs, we just fix shit. Anyway, the connection information is not organized in any way. People add stuff without removing bad information, don’t update the connection database, change passwords without telling anyone, etc. Trying to figure out which IP goes to which machine can be a real bitch (some of our properties have 5 or 8 servers that have our stuff running). Then figuring out what username/password goes with which IP is even more of a pain in the ass. I bitched about this two meetings ago. So did one of my co-workers. They gave the co-worker the job of coming up with a better way to do it. She did, came up with a great way to do it. Then management told us that it really isn’t a problem and my co-workers solution wouldn’t work even if it was a problem. Same thing with known issues/fixes. Our call tracking database keeps track of the information and there is a FAQ section but the search function sucks. Getting useful information out of it is a huge pain in the ass.

Breaks/Lunch. Not scheduled and you don’t always get them. The rule is 2 people always have to be present. Well, on Thursdays and Fridays it is me and one other person. There goes lunch.

Training. Little to none. I still haven’t recieved any training on three of our software packages. I support all the software. There is one software package that is heavily used on Fridays. I haven’t been trained on this software. The woman I work with on Fridays wasn’t trained on this software either. So on Fridays there are two people on shift, on the busiest day for that software package and neither of us have been trained on the software. Smart, huh? I can figure shit out, that’s what I get paid for, but starting from absolute scratch is insane. Oh, and we started supporting hardware. We were sent an email on the support process and given links to a couple Quicktime files to learn the hardware. The videos were basically the sales demonstrations. Helped a whole hell of a lot.

Brush fire management. The management is too busy running around putting out brush fires instead of focusing on how to make things work better. I, and others, have pointed out that if we took some time and fixed somethings now (like the connection info, documentation, etc) we will have more time later since we won’t be running around relearning shit all the fucking time. That time would then be used to catch up on cases. But of course tat isn’t workable for some fucking reason that is beyond me.

Hoarding knowledge. Some people in the company have a lot of knowledge that isn’t being spread around. I think that these people view keeping the knowledge to themselves as job security. The ‘They can’t fire me because no one else knows what I do’ syndrome.

Some people left to another software company that open a support center out here. A few others retired. We had one new hire who came in and on the first day never came back from lunch. That leads me to believe that that new hire was a reasonably smart person.

Slee

5

My, my, my, this is interesting… Check your local labor laws, this may very well be illegal. If you have your resume polished up and distributed, it might be time to bring the hammer down on them over this.

There is only so much efficiency one can squeeze out of customer facing services. You can make one Finance guy do the work of two, if you reduce the requirements on each task. You can’t make one CSR do the work of two without directly affecting the level of service you provide to your customer.

6

If it makes you feel any better, slee, I work for a large software company doing enterprise-level support. We have most of the same problems.

Not enough people? Check
Lack of documentation / organization? Check
No scheduled lunch breaks? Check
Management that can’t seem to understand how to fix the problem? check

As an example, we just reorganized our support department a little so that more people support a wider range of products. Did we make sure those people had any kind of knowledge of their new product set first? No. Just “You used to support X and Y, now you support A and B too.”

I do? Don’t the customers expect the support rep to, y’know, know something about the product their calling about?

Eh, what can you do.

7

This is all because management, in any company, is usually made up of morons. They have no clue how to do anything other than making up slick resumes.

At a company I used to work for, I swear they had this policy: Know something technical? OK, we’ll give you some money to do the technical work. Don’t know anything technical? Great, we’ll give you even more money, call you a manager, and make you the project lead!

8

[petulant hijack]

Damnit, here are all these companies crying out for a good technical writer. Why in hell isn’t anyone hiring me?

[/petulant hijack]

Believe me, slee I know what you mean. I worked for a fairly major company for a while that was, literally, laying people off every single week. So every month or so, the rest of us would get our workloads increased. This wouldn’t have been so bad if (a) they’d slipped delivery dates on the stuff, and (b) the damned salespeople wouldn’t keep promising new features by the next release, but they didn’t, and they did, respectively.

By the time I was laid off, you’d have thought the police morgue was Mardi Gras and the Times Square New Years’ Eve celebration wrapped up into one bright and shiny package.

I’m convinced that once people get to a certain level in an organization, they are required to get their common sense and decency surgically removed.

9

I don’t know - I suspect if you’re a shrewd middle-manager, you convince your higher-ups that your team can do the job with 70% of the current staff - as long as they have your brilliant leadership.

Thus, no slipped dates, lotsa new features, and you keep your job.

No, I’m not cynical. Why do you ask?

10

Oh, yeah. It’s amazing how many of the managers weren’t let go. And when their jobs were eliminated, they were simply moved to other positions that didn’t have the title manager but still paid the same. So in addition to everything else that needed doing, these former managers had to be brought up to speed on the stuff they were documenting because, you know, they’d been *managing * the people doing the writing, they didn’t actually know the software being documented. :rolleyes:

11

Let me run something by you, sleestak; how does the phrase “work to rule” sit with you? If you have an eight-hour shift with a half-hour lunch, work 7 1/2 hours and take a half hour lunch. What are they going to do - fire you? Maybe if you and your shift cohort started doing only what you are paid to do, it might make an impression. Like I said, the worst they can do is fire you, and you’re already looking.

Before say you can’t do that, I have been in a similar position where we had 3 staff in an Accounting department, and were short about 40 hours a day on the work that had to be done. I did my eight hours, and I went home, and I never heard boo about it. I could have agonized over all the things I didn’t get done each shift, but I chose not to. You can’t change your situation, but you can change how you react to it. Just a thought.

12

Wall Street just wuvs a boss who can find creative ways to say “Work harder for less money”. It’s why I am happy at my nonprofit.

13

Well, today I just offically (in my mind) stopped giving a fuck.

If I could quit I would. Can’t afford to quit right now so I am going to stick with it until I find another job.

What really bums me out is that until we lost all the people this was a pretty good place to work. But after we lost people someone somewhere obviously decided that too much money was being spent on support and that they could keep costs down by not rehiring anyone.

Oh, by the way, I usually have a rule about work. That rule is that I can bitch to myself all the way home about work but after that I do not think about work. This thread is an exception to that rule. So now I’m gonna go record something.

Slee

Shameless plug. If anyone is interested this the latest song I have been working on. I really need to find a singer though so I can finish the damned thing…

14

“I feel so much better since I gave up hope.” :smiley:

Good for you, leaving it in the car and not taking it in with you.

15

My company has about a dozen people. It’s been in business about five years. The number five person seniority-wise has been here about a year.

Bad management. Shitty management-to-worker interface.

-Joe