IT Dept. Open or Closed door policy?

[chrisdixon112]

I'm new to these forums. Our team of 4 IT employees support around 400-450 users in our company, and we currently have an open door policy for our employees if they have computer issues. We currently use Infra Enterprise for a ticketing system, which two of us man, while the other two are our Network / sys admins.

Having this door open creates issues with distraction, daily. We have 25-30 walk-ups throughout the day, and all of us get distracted when someone walks in needing assistance. This has become unproductive for all of us on the team, and we're in need of an approach to our employees to close our door, and elimate all of these walk-ups. Has anyone else experienced this change in their company and can provide some helpful insight into how we could and would communicate this to our employees? Anything will be helpful.

 

[cajuntank]

We had almost the same type of scenario at my job with a K-12 school district except instead of our employees coming to our office, they would stop us to look at their problems if they saw us in their building. We too use a ticketing system and it's been one more of education to instruct our teachers and administration that we work solely off of this system by order of "first come, first serve" (unless it's an emergency of course... and someone's mouse or keyboard frozen up or what antivirus should they use at their house is not an emergency ;-) ). We will still get interupted on occasion by new hires that don't know better or teachers that think "they're above the law", but we nicely instruct/remind them on our servicing policy. The interuptions don't end completely, but it does get much better once they understand the necessity of it.

 

[tregas]

That's an excellent question. First, you won't be able to turn it off like a faucet. It will take some time and a well considered replacement platform to get people to stop. Like Cajuntank said, they still get interrupted. It will never go away, as long as you remain on site. Of course, you can't simply move off site, either.

One thing that you can do is establish some protocol and get the CEO or CTO or CIO to sign off on it. You can have people simply send in email when they need help or have a question or resource request, but try using forms instead. With forms you can control how to information is collected and you may be able to apply a certain level of automation to reduce the amount of time you invest in each issue.

This has a couple of effects. One, when you control what information they can select in the form, you can eliminate the subjects and issues which are not within your scope. Two, the available options in the form help to educate the users on what the IT department supports. Third, your department has a much better workflow to triage issues. You do, however, need to make sure you follow up on all requests. Establishing a consistent and reliable process for managing incoming support requests is crucial to this working and retaining executive support.

As for forms, I suggest Microsoft's InfoPath. You likely already have it, and it's quite flexible.

Hope that helps!

Tyler

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Tyler Regas - Nerd. Writer.