All tagged support
No Update Updates
Sometimes we don’t have anything to report on how things are going… this, however, is (oddly) important to report! Letting folks know you’re still on it is just as important as having progress for them.
Order Pushing
Non-technical partners need to be careful to partner with their tech teams… many times they end up just sending orders to their technical partners. This not only results in a weaker relationship, but many times results in a weaker end product.
On Proactivity
When we discover a problem or error the first thing we should do is let others know. This not only gets more eyes on the problem, but helps avoid others being surprised and escalating the problem.
On trees
Keeping details in mind is incredibly important in life. Without them we can never really be sure what we’re doing… unfortunately many times though, we lose sight of this and suffer for it.
Best intentions pave the road to massive headaches for other people
Some of the biggest headaches I’ve had to deal with were the result of really good intentions. As challenging as it is, remembering to treat these as learning opportunities (and not taking someone’s head off) helps not only fix the problem faster, but build better partners.
Understanding both how a system creates/stores data and how it is used is critical to being a good data analyst. Knowing these things makes it easier to interpret information and to tell a good story about any potential results. Failing to Know Thy System at best results in wasted in… and catastrophic decisions at worst.
While collecting defects is a great first step, there’s a lot more that can be done, including retroactive investigations and proactive avoidance.
Despite our best efforts every process or system produces some unwanted or unexpected behavior - defects. Many times our customers are the ones letting us know about them, which is less than good.
Frequently technical resources are pull into projects at the last minute. This deprives the project team of a valuable viewpoint and raises blood pressure all around. Tech should be included as early as possible to best leverage their skills and avoid last minute scrambles.
It can be REALLY hard to remember that there’s another live human behind the ticket you’re working on. Take the time to connect with them on a human level, not only will the ticket go more easily, but you’ll forge a great connection.
We’ve all had to put a ticket into something SOMEWHERE. Despite our collective practice, many tickets do not provide enough info for folks to get the help they need. Here are some tips.
Ticketing systems help us keep track of our work, and many have lots of bells and whistles. At it’s core, however, there’s only a few things that are REALLY needed.
HRIS tends to be the forgotten cousin of IT - it’s frequently brought in at the last minute (if at all). Building better partnerships with HRIS helps both sides, as the business gets better results, and the tech team gets less grey hair.
I always appreciate when my partners think through challenges before coming to my team. It does get a bit dicey when they bring us solutions they think will be best…
Trust what you’re seeing/being told…but always verify it with your own testing.