The CORE Debate

Pros and Cons: TheCOREdebate.docx

Discussion:

Training and Publications

  • often the decision is already made when the work is assigned to the team
  • team attached to the project for much longer
  • need to have a programmatic response

A tool to prioritize our work

  • need to define 80% of what is core
  • what is our investment in core services?
  • where is the data to know what we should focus on?
  • which problems are we trying to solve?
  • knowing WHAT is more important - it differs across faculty/students/staff
  • community impacts
  • financial and resource impacts of support (costs often fall to staff doing transactions)

Core behaviors as opposed to core products

  • are we acting in a "default core" way already
  • focusing on core services would remove some support for users
  • what about VIPs, where we have individual rules?
    • focus on core services so we can become experts and provide better service
    • provide quality and ease of use
    • how do we convince people its the right thing to do?
  • apply same principals to core services to provide high quality service (need departmental approach)
  • VIPs have resources and we don't want them going to others - we want to be the ones they trust

Sometimes the fringe help is minimal in cost and resources

  • but it is often the "big win"
  • not as much reward/recognition for solving core, its what we are supposed to do

Core is a loaded word - its dynamic, not static

  • so how do we distill that into a list? 
  • right focus right now, and how do we regularly evaluate that?
  • lists are comforting, essential for consistency
  • helps people better define your role
  • having everything on the list is as bad as no list at all

Taking the definition of core and bringing it down to our work

  • MIT is a business and it needs to run
  • we are a cost to MIT
  • what are the core activities n campus we want to be supporting as a department?
  • HOW do we want to support them?
  • need to share and get buy in
  • still need to preserve innovation
  • we want to be consistent, high quality, the "go to" IT department
  • what do we want to enable our customers to do easily and reliably?
  • challenge is the new stuff coming into our culture

Having the requirement of minimizing support and documentation

  • make it so easy they don't need to call us (stretch goal!)
  • but by whom and when?

What's the process to manage something that's core?

  • process change
  • looking at changing our business to make tools easier
  • what about changing our rules based restrictions?

Do we have any data on who does not call the help desk?

  • what are they doing right?
  • the fact they don't call does not mean they don't need help

Departmental Services

  • core services don't matter - you're there on SLA to do what the DLC wants
  • what is the downstream impact of that on Service Desk?
  • its core and best effort on other stuff vs helping customers as partner and making recommendations
  • guiding DLCs to the right tools
  • consult and align DLCs
  • understand the functions that they want and we install the best tool
  • define our services better in the SLAs
    • huge cultural shift
    • we could reinforce this by making fringe cost more $$$

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