The ideal world
R&D, Support Service and the IT Ops collaborate
in the same room, on the same incident.
Investigation gets easy and fast.
Root cause gets identified in no time.
Resolution is just a matter of hours.
The reality
R&D, Support Service and the IT Ops reside in their own space.
People work in silos.
And multiple support levels co-exist behind the scene: L1, L2..
Ask your customer support to get the global picture.
Absence of clear answer is not a good sign.
The production
Production environment is an excellent stronghold.
Expected for security reasons. No discussion.
Your data is private and must be protected.
You do not let strangers accessing it easily, even colleagues.
So data access is under strict control : procedures must be followed.
The geography
All actors are not always in the same geographical region.
Servers hosted in the US, support in India, R&D in Europe.
Communication gets slower because different time zones.
You’ll get your answer tomorrow morning.
Differences of culture can also affect the communication.
The means
IT operators, support people and developers do not think the same way.
They basically do not share the same interests and goals.
Tools at their disposal are really different :
– Production tools are monitoring oriented, very expensive.
– Customer support have often home made investigation tools.
– R&D tools are powerful but not adapted for production environments.
Perfect collaboration to solve your issue is currently relying on human talents more than ever : the ones making the bridge over the silos and the ones able to take advantage of the various tools. Rare people.
The organizations
Different companies can be involved : barriers get in place.
It means different internal process flows and company cultures.
I need my manager approval first to prioritize your ticket.
Team rotation is also a reality in support and production.
And resource turnover, especially in developing nations, cannot be ignored on medium term.
Sorry but your support contact has unfortunately left the company.
Yes I know, he was very knowledgeable on the product.
The Ping Pong game
And finally are the interactions, called the ping pong game.
Successive round trips, taking time to access partial information,
hoping R&D will get the right ball to catch the issue.
Some people do play the watch, asking useless questions
while waiting for knowledgeable people to appear.
At the end of the day, you expect to get your critical issue already resolved.
If not the case, you should be informed about the root cause and the resolution time.
