Reduce Your IT Workload
I can’t tell you how sick I am of people asking me the same question over and over. And, typically, this is a question that I probably shouldn’t really be having to deal with in the first place. Do some of these questions sound familiar to you?
“How do I make a template in Word?”
“Where are my rows in Excel and why does it skip row numbers?”
“Can I change all of the PowerPoint slides at once?”
To be honest, I am not paid to answer these questions. These are basic function questions that have nothing to do with how the systems work or providing the people with the tools that are necessary to do their jobs. It is not a part of IT’s mandate to train or tech people on how to use the tools for their job.
But, we work in a small company and this is not uncommon to see. In fact, in all of my IT jobs, this exact thing happens. So, how to you prevent yourself from becoming overwhelmed by the avalanche of non-technical questions?
The solution that I have discovered which any shop can implement is application champions. What is an application champion? An application champion is someone whom is considered to be more highly skilled at using a specific computer application or program than the average user. They are not a member of the IT department but are skilled in the normal use of a specific application. They need not be technical in the IT sense.
There are three steps that you need to take when setting up your company to use application champions:
- Identify Application Champions. In the company that I now work for, I sent out an e-mail to everyone in each office with a list of all the regular applications that are used. I then asked them to nominate a person for each application as being an advanced user of this application. Make sure that you spell out clearly that they can not nominate members of the IT department. Make sure that you do not use the same person for all of the champion positions so that if one person leaves the company, then you will not lose all of your extra talent!
- Enable Application Champions. Get buy in from your new champions and then get them trained! Make sure that they are able to answer most of the questions that they will be inundated with and provide them with the resources that they need to take on this responsibility.
- Use Application Champions. Make a big production about introducing the application champions once they are ready to be put to use. Send out a list of all the application champions and the applications that they are “certified” to help with. Encourage users to work with these people and help each other out.
13 Responses to “Reduce Your IT Workload”
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Kim Jalun Says:
September 6th, 2007 at 8:50 amI think that a quick response to each of the questions you posed should be to have the user type the question into Google. Champions can help, but it doesn’t address what I believe is the core issue in that these people aren’t helping themselves when they really should be able to. All of these types of questions have been asked before, and answered, and with the Internet and search engines, it makes it easier than ever to self-serve the answers. The internet is always available (in contrast to champions), and contains more cumulative information than any appointed champion could ever conceive of.
e.g.,
How do I make a template in Word
Top result:
Creating a Template – The Basics (Part I)Where are my rows in Excel and why does it skip row numbers
Top result:
Excel XP/X: FAQ, UWEC
(a little trickier, because you’d have to scroll down and read about unhiding columns, instead of rows, but it does address identifying filtered results)Can I change all of the PowerPoint slides at once
In top 5 results:
Change all your fonts at once - PowerPoint - Microsoft Office OnlineYahoo! Answers - Can you remove all animations at once in Power …
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Thomas Blake Says:
September 6th, 2007 at 12:24 pmGreat idea, Tim. This is a frequent problem because often times, people who have no idea of what specifically our job involves (because there are uneducated as far as computer science & it is concerned) just assume that application support is part of our jobs.
These same people would not interrupt a vice president while he’s reading a report or a receptionist while she’s taking a message, but the don’t think twice about interrupting us while we’re coding software or configuring servers. Why? Because applications work on computers and we are the computer guys. As long as you are mis-informed, it’s only a natural assumption.
I think your idea is a good one because of two reasons - one, it removes unnecessary tasks from our day, and two it educates our colleagues about what exactly our role entails.
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Tim Fehlman Says:
September 6th, 2007 at 12:58 pm@Kim Jalun
You’re problems really start when someone asks, “How do I Google?”!
With all joking aside, this is a really good way to get information but the average user does not want to find the answer themselves. They want someone to tell them how to do it. This is especially true for people who are not comfortable with computers.
Tim
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Dave Wall Says:
September 6th, 2007 at 1:17 pmNo, don’t teach the users about google! If they find out about that, I lose all my mystical guru status and next thing I know, I’m looking at the want ads!
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Richard in Kunming Says:
September 6th, 2007 at 7:52 pmI face this problem constantly and I believe you’ve identified an excellent solution. I’m not entirely sure if we have even one person who does have a good working knowledge of the basic APPS but I am definitely going to either find one, or grow one.
Thanks!
(visions of possible new productivity dance in my head) -
Vivian Says:
September 6th, 2007 at 9:54 pmThis is a great idea and I can think of a number of people in my office who could fit in this role for various apps.
BUT, and this is a serious question: What’s in it for them? Why should they say ‘buy in’? It’s not as if they aren’t already busy with their ‘real’ work, but now they’re going to be inundated with questions that decrease their productivity (and they are measured on productivity). How do I get their bosses to buy into this new area of responsibility? Because without agreement from their boss, this just ain’t happening.
Don’t get me wrong: I love this idea (I’ve begun to set up a knowledge wiki so I can point them to the answers for these repetitious questions - but the setup is time-consuming), I just don’t know how I can move it from great idea to real-life practice.
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Tim Fehlman Says:
September 6th, 2007 at 10:14 pm@Vivian:
There are a few keys to getting buying:
1. Make a big deal about it! I plan to announce my application champions and present each of them with a certificate at our monthly staff meetings. Everyone loves attention.
2. Provide training with skills that they can put on a resume. This will give them the opportunity to potentially ask for a higher salary if they move on to another place of employment.
3. Distributes knowledge. If the one IT guy answers all of these questions and he moves on to another company, all of that knowledge goes with him. But, if you spread the knowledge for some of these daily tools throughout the company, then there is less of a hit when someone leaves.
4. Saves money. Whom would you rather have creating Word templates, a $75,000/year IT specialist or a $35,000/year secretary?
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Adam T Says:
September 7th, 2007 at 3:29 amI halved faced this same problem time and time again, to the point I started to refuse to spend time explaining to people where there toolbars had gone to. I found using apps champions worked for us.
But as mentioned previously champions as not always around. So what I found is that if you used a knowledge base system on for example the companies intranet then the champions enters the Q and A for every question they get asked.
The only down side to this was educating users to actually check the knowledge base
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Vivian Says:
September 7th, 2007 at 8:47 am@Tim
Thank you, Tim. In the environment in which I work, your points 3 and 4 will help me to persuade management of the benefits of the apps champion system. And combining the apps champions approach with the internal knowledge base wiki (which I’ve been creating but which can just as easily be maintained by the apps champions) should work for everyone.
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Improbus Says:
September 7th, 2007 at 9:09 amTraining? We can’t even get that for people in the IT department. My training comes down to this, we need this done … learn how to do it.
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[Geeks Are Sexy] Technology News | Technology, science, news and social issues for geeks. Says:
September 10th, 2007 at 9:46 amStates, the ability to take effective, meaningful notes is a crucial skill. Not only do good notes help us recall facts and ideas we may have forgotten, the act of writing things down helps many of us to remember them better in the first place. -Reduce Your IT WorkloadA great way to prevent yourself from becoming overwhelmed by the avalanche of non-technical questions at work. -7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable Scientists call it the Naked Photo Test, and it works like this: say a photo turns up
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Nick Says:
September 10th, 2007 at 4:54 pmI like the idea of having application champions or “owners”. And I’ve used it with varying degrees of success in different situations and at different companies. But the buy-in really depends on A) How much effort you put into selling the idea, and B) the culture of the organization. If the culture isn’t there, and you’re not in a position to change the culture (and bullet point this… very few are), either deal-with the situation another way, or get over it.
I’ve found some organizations where it’s easy to get your CAD group to “own” AutoCAD. But in others, where IT is an overhead, and CAD is billable… you’re never going to get buy-in on having a CAD owner in the CAD group. Why? Because it doesn’t make sense for an otherwise billable person to take the time out of his/her day to help other people (Well, I take that back… I think it makes a lot of sense, but I don’t see it work out very often). The reason? Usually there’s a financial incentive to keep the billable person on task… like they get paid more to get more work done. So they’re only going to do so much to help out their other team members… and besides, it’s much easier to dump it on IT… especially if IT is an overhead… like it usually is in a small-to-midsized organization.
Which brings me to my next point (I’m putting on my ownership/leadership hat). If you’re an overhead, and other people are billable, you’ve got a problem. It’s your job to be the technology catch-all (just like the receptionist/secretary is a catch-all). Further, I’d argue that if you think you’re perceived as “more valuable” by organizational leadership relative to the receptionist who makes 1/3 of what you make… you’ve probably got your head screwed on wrong. You’re 3x the cost, and your value probably isn’t perceived day-to-day. So from an ownership/ leadership perspective… if IT isn’t pulling their own weight, why keep them around? I kid you not… for the vast majority of small and midsized organizations that I’ve been involved with, the value-add of IT isn’t perceived beyond the break-fix of the day-to-day. So forget all of your big-dreams and interesting Exchange 2007 migration projects. No one really cares besides the IT group. And why does no one care? Because your IT managers consistently (and repeatedly) overpromise and under-deliver. Beyond that, every three years you go and complain about not having new equipment, not having good training, not making enough money. You’re just a cost-center that someone hasn’t gotten around to cutting. If you’re an overhead, that’s all you’ll ever be to leadership/ownership. So while you’re trying to get buy-in on having application champions, the only thing that ownership/leadership hearing is “IT’s too lazy to do their jobs”.
(Taking off the ownership hat)… if you’re not getting traction on the concept of application champions, then you need to find a way to articulate IT’s value. And the best way I’ve ever found, is by dollarizing what you do. And the first step to dollarize… a good ticketing system. Find one; make your team use it religiously. Then take it a step further, auto generate ticks from events in the event logs (well, some anyway). Find a way to show how you’re allocating your IT staffing resources to departments, and you’ll find a way to articulate your value proposition… and to justify appropriate staffing.
Next step? Hire more people.
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Addicted to IT Says:
September 11th, 2007 at 1:45 pmtemplates, your CAD people owning AutoCAD, etc.). I’m a big proponent of this - under the right circumstances - but you have to be aware of how IT is perceived by the organization if you want this to be received in the manner that it’s intended. So Iposted a commentthat ran a bit long (okay… ran too long to be a comment), and I just wanted to link it up here. Reason being, that while I really like the ideal of identifying non-IT people as the application “champions” or “owners”, and I’ve seen it work
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Brock Angelo Says:
September 25th, 2007 at 12:04 amTim, this is a really great idea - btw, how do I leave comments here? HA!
I think this is something I’m going to recommend - I’ll let you know if we are able to put this to work in our office.
