IT BS thread

That is at least the silver lining.

 

Anyone have to deal with third party outsourcing companies such as TCS, IBM, Accenture, or others?

 

All of the above and two dozen others. By the time we finish with them, they can only operate inside our network.

Welcome to CitrixWorld.

 

we've been slowly forced to outsource a lot of our remote sites to TCS for support. I really can't figure out what we pay them for. we end up doing all of the fucking work anyways. they are a glorified monitoring system that i'm sure i could write scripts that do a better job than they do.

 

I hate the lack of visibility. I should be able to see and monitor all of the actions taken on our behalf in their cloud.

Not too much to ask. Just because the contract indemnifies is in the event of a data breach, I’d rather not have to sue them and have the peace of mind that all the security measures are working as designed.

Is that too hard?

 

I've dealt with these companies as well, but I hesitate to blame the companies or their staff. This is a management issue that I have seen at the last 2 companies I've been at. Management gets it in place and celebrates the goal of outsourcing, then just pays the bills and washes their hands of it, checking whatever compliance boxes need to be checked. At my previous employer, my team heavily used the same company you mentioned. We did regular reviews of the work and staff and made adjustments along the way. If they wanted to promote someone (meaning we would get charged a higher rate as well), we made them adjust their staff to get back to the mix we actually needed. If someone wasn't cutting it, we had them swap them out. They were happy to work with us like this, you just have to actively manage them. Otherwise they just keep the contracted number of staff on the contract and send you bills.

 

I really wish ours worked that way. Instead, our contract is just for a service. We have no say in who is providing the service other than they work for TCS, Accenture, etc. What we end up with is them always coming back to us to do 90% of the stuff. They might as well have paid us the several $mil and we could have done it all ourselves. (which we pretty much already do).

 

We set up a managed service with them to do L1 support with eventual growth into L2 level support. The problem was we started with no knowledge base at all -- there was no information for them to use to address trouble tickets or simple service requests. This was our fault for not having some fundamental IT processes in place (we had just started requiring things to have a ticket associated with it rather than an email, phone call or tap on the shoulder). So, we required our folks to document KB articles for common problems and measured the growth and effectiveness of the KB over time. It took us about 9 months to get to the point where 90%+ of the issues were handled by L1 using KB articles.

Again, this is likely a management issue. Management needs to know that a significant number of issues are being passed up the chain and do something about it.

Funny thing was, one of my support leads that was the most vocal (she was in Philadelphia and was a typical Philly personality, LOL) and against the whole thing became the biggest promoter once she saw that it worked and made her work more rewarding. She led the entire effort.

 

I just want people to use Lync/Skype properly. If you're dialing in, don't also join the audio from your computer. You're creating a feedback loop, asshat.

 

I have literally no idea why this is always an issue


“Oh were not using Skype audio?”


“Have we ever?”


Lol

 

We have to use it, but I also had my hard phone replaced with a soft phone. So everything is through the computer. I have people that LITERALLY will dial in with the soft phone, and then STILL join audio through Skype. I want to kill them - the feedback loop is horrible!

 

half my team has soft phones, and I dont know what is worse.. the audio from skype or the audio from the soft phones lol

 

And then there's the ones that show up in person and still connect to the online meeting and join the audio.

 

I liken them to people who take little radios to football games and listen to the game on AM while they're watching it. Dude, you just saw the tackle - do you really need the color guy to explain how the receiver's children are doing great in school and like unicorns?

We know you're not taking notes on that laptop, but answering emails you ignored yesterday. Knock that shit off and pay attention to what we're discussing now.

 

I'm all for outsourcing the L1 and maybe L2 support. We sat with them and gave them all of the processes and yet still they constantly email us or assign the ticket to take care of something they are supposed to do.

 

We just got a new help desk - they completely replaced contracts. At the same time, we changed ticketing systems.

It's been a nightmare.

I hate changing L1 (we've done it 3 times in 3 years) because there's always a long learning curve that they have to overcome before they're useful. It's come down to "don't call the help desk between April and July if you need accurate assistance." This of course burdens L2, who is busy fixing all of L1s mistakes.

Sometimes, it's enough to make me wish I could make the same money I do now but by driving a forklift at Home Depot. If I could make six figures I'd be wearing that orange apron in a hot minute.

 

Another example of somebody complaining about the cost or the level of service, and someone coming up with the idea of switching vendors to solve the problem and putting a feather in their cap. All while ignoring or downplaying all of the implications and switching costs, many of which are hard to quantify but very real.

I'm with you on the career change. I shouldn't really complain, but it does get a little old dealing with the same problems over and over and seeing the same mistakes being made.

 

We have a legal battle happening between us and the losers in a massive contract bid. The lowest bidders weren't selected, and there are good reasons for it. They'd have to pay the employees LESS in a town where costs are going up, making the good ones leave. We weren't having it, and awarded the contract to the company that would properly compensate the talent we hoped to keep, and the losers are crying about it in court.

I am a firm believer in getting what you pay for, and you NEVER go skimpy on the talent.

 

That's just silly. Accept that your strategy backfired and just move on. I used to work for a large aerospace/defense company that lost a contract partly because our financial model was too complicated to understand, lol. They usually appealed, but I think they skipped appealing that one.

I miss Austin, but I mainly miss what it was like in the early to mid-90's. Reasonable cost of living, great culture, still somewhat undiscovered, and not the flat prairie that makes up much of Texas. But the tech boom pulled in a lot of west coasters that realized it was culturally similar and a heck of lot cheaper. But I guess change was inevitable. I haven't been back in almost 10 years now, probably wouldn't recognize it.