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Home -> Community -> Mailing Lists -> Oracle-L -> User communication (was d/b health check)
Allans post brings a nice situation back in memory. I got hired as a
contractor, together with an interim manager, at a communal datacentre,
where they had fired all DBA/SA staff (5 people) because of, let's say,
suboptimal formance. Task: hire new staff and set up proper management
and procedures.
They had some nice home-grown helpdesk software running. After a couple
of weeks, up and running again with some contractors, statistics
(ratio's) derived from the helpdesk system worsened severely. Management
got concerned, because the new staff performed far worse than the fired
staff ever did. I started a small inquiry among some senior users, and
we found the root cause of the raising wait times in the helpdesk calls:
The users started to experience that problems, once reported, actually
got solved, mostly within a couple of hours in stead of days or weeks,
and started to feed us with drawers full of still unresolved problems,
many of them up to a year or more of age. This of course saturated the
capacity of the new staff, resulting in queuing, context switching, and
bad performance.
The frustration about the old staff had simply suspended the problem reporting. Only severe problems (standstills) got reported, reporting anything else had proven to be a waste of time. The change in capacity initiated an increasing demand. After the bulk load was solved some weeks later, user satisfaction raised, the number of calls lowered and response-times were OK.
Yes, communication with users can be very helpfull. In this case it helped to twist the mind of management into a better mood than ever before!
Best regards,
Carel-Jan Engel
===
If you think education is expensive, try ignorance. (Derek Bok)
===
> I think a set of representative queries with based line response time
> is
> good if you can afford the extra load and the deck of queries is
> reasonably stable. Otherwise cultivate relationships with your most
> verbal users. They'll call once they know you care.
>
> Allan
>
-- Archives are at http://www.freelists.org/archives/oracle-l/ FAQ is at http://www.freelists.org/help/fom-serve/cache/1.html -----------------------------------------------------------------Received on Wed Aug 25 2004 - 15:40:48 CDT
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