How about this for a ridiculous situation? This conversation occurred soon after I’d taken over as the manager of several ed tech teams including a technical support team.
Me to team leader: Could you print out or send me a report on how many call-outs to schools you’ve had in the past month, and how long each job took to be successfully completed, please?
TL: No.
Me: Sorry?
TL: The software we use doesn’t allow us to do that.
Me: Well, what does it allow you to do?
TL: Enter details of which schools we visit, what we do there, and how long it takes to complete a job.
Me: Yes, that’s what I asked for.
TL: Yes, but it only lets you enter the data, not extract any.
Me: Well what’s the point of entering the data then?
TL: There isn’t, but our previous line manager said we had to, so we do.
Me: Well, why do you even use such a useless program?
TL: Our previous line manager…
Me: OK. Well I’m going to create another program using Excel that will give us all the information we need.
That’s what I did, and to my initial surprise, the technical support team were very much against using it. The reason was that they thought this was going to be yet another stick to beat them with.
The situation I walked into was one in which Headteachers in the local schools seemed to have made a sport out of complaining about the technical support they received from my team. As far as I knew, the support was excellent, and that’s why I wanted the report I asked for in the first place: I wanted to be able to prove it — or to deal with it if the negative reports proved to be true.
Despite the team’s objections, I asked them to log all their visits in the new system. I also asked them to make sure that the Headteacher knew they were in school, by popping into the their secretary and asking to see them in order to say “Hello” at the start of their visit. Then they were to see the Headteacher afterwards to get him or her to sign a sheet of paper to acknowledge that they had been, and to evaluate the service they’d received. I borrowed the rubric for this from a car breakdown service. At the time, when you called them out, they asked you to evaluate them on criteria such as timeliness, presentation and courtesy.
The system worked beautifully. The very next time a Headteacher phoned the Director of Education to complain about the technical support service, he came to me to ask what was going on.
“The headteacher says he never gets any technical support from your team, and is complaining about having to pay for a non-existent service.”
“That’s funny.”, I said. “The technician was in the school last Thursday, and the Head evaluated her as ‘Excellent’. Here’s his signature.”
On another occasion, about a week later, my line manager was in a Heads’ meeting. As predicted, they started to complain about the technical support service, or lack of it.
“That’s funny”, said my line manager. “According to this report I picked up this morning, 98% of you rated the service as ‘Excellent’, while the remaining 2% rated it as ‘Very Good’. The average length of time taken to sort a problem out was one working day, although most problems were sorted out within half an hour. Also, all of the people in this room who have just been complaining were visited in the last two weeks, and rated the visit as ‘Excellent’. So I don’t quite understand what the problem is.”
As a result of two or three incidents like this, the complaints completely dried up. So what can we learn from this?
It’s good to have hard evidence of what has been done. In this case it was not just the data the technicians entered into the spreadsheet — let’s be honest, they might have made it up — but, crucially, the Headteachers’ evaluation and signature.
If you do a job, make sure someone important knows about it. I am not talking about crowing on Twitter or going around saying how wonderful you are. Let’s face it, that behaviour is as obnoxious as it is tiresome. In this case, simply saying “Hello” to the Headteacher or their Secretary, both at the start and finish of the visit, along with a brief description of what the problem had been and how they solved it, was very useful indeed. Not only did it indicate to the Headteacher that the visit had taken place, but also how long it lasted.
Had the technical support team been lazy or useless, the reports available through this spreadsheet might well have been a stick with which to beat them. As it was, however, it only helped to show how conscientious, efficient and skilled they were.
Finally, although having a way of entering data can be useful to give you and others the feeling that you’re doing something, there really is no point unless you can get meaningful data back out of it.