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The company I work for has been around for forty years. They are one of the leaders in their industry. They are subject to both SEC regulations and the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation. The company is not only highly computerized, the service would be, in today's age, undeliverable without it. They have a staff of over 100 developers in three locations in the US and two others over-seas (that I know of). Put all of that together, and you'll understand why I boggled when I found out that they don't have a in-house helpdesk. The desktop guys handle their calls directly, the network guys take the calls about the network, firewall, and Internet access, and the developers bomb my group with calls about the Unix and Linux systems that they develop on and that run the production software. Oh, and we have a mainframe group, a Lotus Notes admin group and some other folks who's job I've yet to learn, all of whom take all their own support calls. No centralized in-house group to route problems to the correct group, to handle the simple level 1 type calls, to do the simple, repetitive tasks like password resets.
My group of 10 admins takes turns playing helpdesk for the week. This week would have been the week for the guy I replaced (who moved to a different group in-house), so last week I stepped-up and told my manager that I'd do it. I said there's no faster way to learn the systems, processes, expectations and types of requests that we get than to just get in there and do it. Plus I figured my new co-workers would appreciate it. What my manager arranged was a compromise of sorts. I'm handling the request queue during the day with help. She assigned a different person each day to work with me, as not everything is well documented, and the system they use doesn't prioritize the incoming requests. The flip-side is that I am the primary on-call contact for after-hours urgent problems. I do have someone to call for assistance, but I am hoping and praying that I do not get called. So far so good, and I hope I didn't just jinx myself there.
Monday and Tuesday were hectic, but today was more relaxed and I got to work on my scripting project some more. I'm trying to automate login ID creation requests. Right now it's a 5 step process and I'm trying to reduce it to two. We'll see.
My group of 10 admins takes turns playing helpdesk for the week. This week would have been the week for the guy I replaced (who moved to a different group in-house), so last week I stepped-up and told my manager that I'd do it. I said there's no faster way to learn the systems, processes, expectations and types of requests that we get than to just get in there and do it. Plus I figured my new co-workers would appreciate it. What my manager arranged was a compromise of sorts. I'm handling the request queue during the day with help. She assigned a different person each day to work with me, as not everything is well documented, and the system they use doesn't prioritize the incoming requests. The flip-side is that I am the primary on-call contact for after-hours urgent problems. I do have someone to call for assistance, but I am hoping and praying that I do not get called. So far so good, and I hope I didn't just jinx myself there.
Monday and Tuesday were hectic, but today was more relaxed and I got to work on my scripting project some more. I'm trying to automate login ID creation requests. Right now it's a 5 step process and I'm trying to reduce it to two. We'll see.
