When your data team is growing, the way you did support before won’t cut it anymore. You don’t want this work to balloon and not leave enough time for the team to work on longer term important projects.
When I led a small team of three, it was easy to establish a strict separation of responsibilities amongst team members and to handle support requests ad-hoc as they came up. It was also easy for me to mentally track who was working on what.
However, as the team size grew, the amount of support requests increased and took longer to get addressed. There was more overlap of responsibilities, which highlighted how cumbersome it was to share information about these support requests. What’s more, it became more difficult for team members to know how to prioritize across an increasingly varied pool of requests.
Here are three steps that helped me in the past and I hope they can help you regain control of your support work as your data team scales.
1. Centralize requests to an issue tracker
I used Asana, but many other companies use Jira for this purpose. 1-to-1 private messages (say, on Slack) are attractive in the beginning. It’s a concierge service that your stakeholders will really appreciate, but the communication challenges soon make it not worth it.
Things to Keep in Mind:
- Make it transparent for all team members and stakeholders to see.
- Keep conversations in the issue tracker (and not other mediums like Slack or email)
- Don’t worry about prioritizing or ordering right now.
Key Benefits:
- Stakeholders see what else the team is working on (therefore being and might be able to help each other)
- Your team members can see what others are working on and makes on-boarding a new team member easier.
- Covering for others is easier, as team members can search previous issues and see how they were handled
- You as the lead on the team can see patterns in how
2. Dedicated Triage
You might investigate a rotating triage schedule later on, but it’s important that this is one person for now (you).
Things to Keep in Mind:
- Respond to stakeholders quickly – you need to maintain their trust. They’ll be used to their white-glove service of going to someone individually. You need to convince them that this new process works as well if not better.
- Figure out context of the problem by asking clarifying questions of the requester and prioritize aggressively. You will need to have a good idea of company strategy in order to prioritize across different departments. Loop in other team members only if necessary.
- (There can be an entire post about this one point probably)
- If important and urgent enough, assign to a team member. They should receive a link to the issue in the issue tracker, which should have all the conversation and information so far.
- Make it all transparent to stakeholders and team members: priority order, work status (e.g. to do, doing, done, won’t do)
Benefits:
- Other team members don’t need to worry about inbound support requests, so they can focus on project work
- Other team members will know if they are tapped to work on something (or consulted on it), then you’ve already done at least some work on understanding the context of the requester’s problem
- Stakeholders can see the priority of their own and others’ requests, so they will know why something is being worked on or not
Drawback:
- Some team members are interested in the triaging and having early, direct contact with stakeholders. With this change, they won’t be able to do that. If you move to a rotating triage schedule, make sure to involve them.
3. Periodically examine your issue tracker for patterns to brainstorm solutions
You’ll want to notice the issues that took a lot of work and/or took a long time to resolve. The solutions might be:
- Improving documentation for stakeholders
- Holding training sessions
- Proactive communication, like updates on your roadmap or new functionality
- Project work to make the support requests irrelevant or less painful
Communicating these Changes
Of course changing the way you provide support to your stakeholders will require their buy-in, so it’s important to give full visibility of the transition plan, especially highlighting the incremental value for your stakeholders at every step.
Regaining Confidence and Control
Once you roll it out, you’ll be confident that all support requests are tracked in one place and that you can prioritize across them. Your team will feel confident that they are working on the most important issues and will feel comfortable collaborating on them. Your stakeholders will feel confident that their requests are acknowledged and will see how their requests line up with other requests. (And if they disagree with prioritization, they have facts on the ground to start a conversation in order to ensure the data team’s priorities are aligned with company strategy.)
You will have regained control of your data team’s support work. You’ll keep your team and stakeholders happy and carve out time to work on long term projects that will create long-term impact for the company.
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(Photo by Neil Thomas on Unsplash)