How does your team handle support requests

Question

Hi All,

I have just taken over as manager at a company and at the moment they are very rigid in how they approach development. Everyone gets a list of what they are doing each week. My question is how does your company balance support with development and if an important support request comes in how is this processed without disturbing the flow of the developers?

Lastly, do you use an software log support requests and development tasks.

Thanks

Update - Thanks all for your comments, im taking baby steps at the moment as there is no current development methodology in place. im slowly introducing agile as the company is very reactive and im trying to change the thinking. Its no easy task and a lot has to change to get there! At the moment the developers are working as 6 individuals so i need to bring them together as a team. I have my work cut out!!

Answer 1

What's interesting is, that based on my experience managing skilled employees, is you often get better results out of those employees, by giving them perceived moments (albeit short) of absolute freedom. I.e., with software developers, every few months, or twice a year, something like that; allow them 24 hours where they can work on anything they want, with the condition that they share their results with the company. It's absolutely insane to think of how well this helps focus a team on their day to day activities, even if support requests are interleaved with development cycles.

Key point is, baby steps. Read and react, don't try and make large scale changes. It's harder to roll back if needed, and more disruptive.

Answer 2

Log any bugs/feature requests etc using redmine or any similar project management software. Unfuddle is also a good alternative. Try which works for you and your team. Usually we assign one bugmaster each sprint. In a team of 7 developers, and 3 week coding sprints, you get to be bugmaster every 21 weeks.

Of course this assumes the everyone on your team knows the whole app so while the others are developing, the bugmaster keeps on killing off your bugs + support requests(in the form of tickets)

Answer 3

We are a little IT office (4), I'm in charge of the supports and I also do some development (20% support, 80% dev, but it can be 50 50 sometimes).

I avoid to interrupt my dev with support : I try take care of the support only after a break (coffee, lunch whatever) or when I begin on the morning. Because even if it takes only 5 min, it'll take maybe 15 min to go back to what you were doing.

I'd also suggest to take as less as possible phone call because it's always easier when you're speaking about tech stuff to do it by mail, and it's faster (I did some code over the phone and it's quite annoying).

Answer 4

I surmise from you question that you don't have the luxury of having separate development and support teams. In this scenario, which I also labour under, if an important support request comes in then it is tackled, and development is delayed.

However, there is a triage process which determines whether a support request is important (enough) to attract immediate attention, or should go into the pile of feature requests for future development.

Of course we keep lists of requests and tasks, I can't conceive how to run a development shop without a lot of lists.

Finally, YOU have just taken over as a manager, what do YOU propose to do ?

Answer 5

If you are getting support requests regularly, then you could put the support requests in the list of tasks... the task could be something like "write documentation on how to do such-and-such" or "resolve such-and-such issue". Whether it is urgent or not could be indicated by the priority level of the task. If this is something you only get once in a while, then, in addition to adding it to the task list, if it is really, really urgent, you might want to interrupt the flow to give a heads up about the request.

Answer 6

• How does your company balance support with development?

The usual way is either to e-mail or walk up to the developer who most likely knows about the project in question and tell them to fix it.

• If an important support request comes in how is this processed without disturbing the flow of the developers?

It's not.

Answer 7

One thing to remember is that support of existing production issues is first prioity much of the time. No one cares if you get interrupted on the the thing with the deadline two weeks out when users can't log in to the system right now. Development is second priority over all but the most minor of production problems. It is not interrupting them to do support, it is their job to do support. (Unless you have a separate support team, which I strongly feel is a bad idea because devs who don't have to do support make the same mistakes over and over and never even know that others are fixing their trash.)

If you feel you must assign a different person each day to do support. At least that way they know in advance when they have to do it.