I've been involved in many areas of IT over the years, but, in the enterprise arena, there's a strongly upheld rule that I've always presumed OSS projects followed.
The rule can be summarised as "Send a help-desk ticket."
I have regularly advised team members to reply to personal requests for assistance with a polite "Send a help-desk ticket" (Obviously precluding the Directors / VIPs in the company)
This centralises the information, allows reporting and transparency, and means that if some-one happens to be off sick, or away on holidays, someone else can look after the problem.
Programmers like their instructions and data to be in orderly, prioritisable queues and I see no reason why support requests should be any different.
On the Go project we frequently say "File an issue." That's because the issue tracker is the primary way we organize our work. If your issue isn't on the tracker, then it's not visible to us.
A lot of people take that as "File an issue and STFU." I guess that's because when your problem goes from being an active discussion thread to an issue labelled as "Priority-Later" you feel like you're being ignored. But the reality is that there's a practically infinite amount of work to do and a very small number of people to do it.
Now that I think about it, this seems to be the main reason people resent being redirected to the "proper channels." Because they know they're not going to get special treatment. They'll just have to wait until their problem reaches the top of the pile. (And maybe it never will.)
Just a view from the other side of the fence; I've found the Go team tend to do a very good job of balancing core performance advances and addressing feature requests from the community.
Obviously, not including "can we have feature x from language y" requests, most obvious issues (garbage collection performance, crypto, http and html libraries etc.) are being addressed in a logical and timely fashion.
>(Obviously precluding the Directors / VIPs in the company)
You might be surprised how infrequently "VIPs" want special treatment. When they do, IME, they'll make it perfectly clear, but in a healthy org, most senior people would prefer IT to work on the company's highest priorities.
If you give white glove treatment to every exec, everytime, you're not only working out of priority order, hurting the company today, you're also hiding a potential capacity problem for the future. "What do you mean help desk needs two more hires? Everytime I call, two techs come a-running; there's NO WAY they need more staff. Next."
The statement you quoted was meant (although not in any way obvious) to be a resigned statement of acceptance that, given a certain size, there will be those in any company that demand special attention, and sometimes it's a battle you can't win. Although it does throw everyone else's schedules out of whack.
I hear ya (and understood your point). I agree that it's OK in moderation or when very specifically asked for (whether it's obviously justified or not).
I was just trying to point out some of the downsides that I've shared with my teams who are sometimes too eager-beaver to work in pecking order rather than priority order. People generally want to do the right thing; sometimes they need help framing what that right thing is.
I agree completely, and I'm happy to see examples of orgs where the execs / directors respect and realise that the teams that they hire (IT, HR, Sales, Pick / Pack, whatever) will do the best job they can given the opportunity. The feeling of trust in employees is tangible, and therefore mutual and reciprocal.
If you're the head of a company, or indeed anyone leading a team, please take note of the above point. Trust your people to do their job (you can still measure their performance) and they will trust you to do your's.
Seconded! At my company, our support staff are explicitly instructed not to treat anyone in the IT organization differently, but they do still bend over backward for the top business execs. As long as they consistently file postmortems and analyze root causes, I'm mostly ok with that.
The rule can be summarised as "Send a help-desk ticket."
I have regularly advised team members to reply to personal requests for assistance with a polite "Send a help-desk ticket" (Obviously precluding the Directors / VIPs in the company)
This centralises the information, allows reporting and transparency, and means that if some-one happens to be off sick, or away on holidays, someone else can look after the problem.
Programmers like their instructions and data to be in orderly, prioritisable queues and I see no reason why support requests should be any different.
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