Process, Policy Procedures

I have recently had a breakthrough, I have always heard about the 3P's, but never put much credence into them, because everything has always worked out ok in the end. Over the past several several months I have seen many offices where things have been getting out of control, support ticket after support ticket, large project after large project. I have begun to feel over whelmed, no matter what was thrown at thickets, they kept coming. Close 1 ticket 3 more open up, assign 2 tickets, group 5 together, 10 more come in. Needless to say, things were weighing heavily on me. Then I managed to get some free time and take in a few sessions from out Local ISSA, Man what a difference! I geaned so much out of the sessions that just filled voids that I knew were there, but just could not put my finger on.

Suddenly everything made sense, of the multitude of tickets most were boiled down to people not following SOP, needing more training, and just plain not stopping to think about the problem before they screamed for help. There were still many tickets to deal with, but the immense pressure of losing tracting every time I turned around, all the questioning I had been doing about my skills, and those of people around me had been lifted.

Even in small environments you need a well defined set of Policies, Procedure, and Processes, they do not need to be as complex as SOX, PCI, ITIL or the like, but expectations need to be concrete of both the staff, and the IT people, as well as those from Top Management. Part of the 3P's should also include training, ownership and pain.

Training is obvious, everyone, including IT needs more training.
Ownership, everyone needs to own their piece of the process, or their machine, something.
Pain, the pain in failure of the 3P's needs to fall in the proper place back to the owner of said resource, ie if the user has been sitting on a problem and now they have a deadline, the pain needs to be the user's not IT's and if IT has been screwing around not fixing a problem, then the converse is true.

Here are some articles that I have found very helpful.
http://andyitguy.blogspot.com/2008/06/why-process-trumps-technology.html
This is more of an example of Faulure of 3P's
http://www.infoworld.com/infoworld/article/07/05/07/19FEuser4_1.html

-- Tim Krabec
Kracomp.com