IT Dept. Open or Closed door policy?
IT Dept. Open or Closed door policy?
(OP)
I'm new to these forums. Our team of 4 IT employees support around 400-450 users in our company, and we currently have an open door policy for our employees if they have computer issues. We currently use Infra Enterprise for a ticketing system, which two of us man, while the other two are our Network / sys admins.
Having this door open creates issues with distraction, daily. We have 25-30 walk-ups throughout the day, and all of us get distracted when someone walks in needing assistance. This has become unproductive for all of us on the team, and we're in need of an approach to our employees to close our door, and elimate all of these walk-ups. Has anyone else experienced this change in their company and can provide some helpful insight into how we could and would communicate this to our employees? Anything will be helpful.
Having this door open creates issues with distraction, daily. We have 25-30 walk-ups throughout the day, and all of us get distracted when someone walks in needing assistance. This has become unproductive for all of us on the team, and we're in need of an approach to our employees to close our door, and elimate all of these walk-ups. Has anyone else experienced this change in their company and can provide some helpful insight into how we could and would communicate this to our employees? Anything will be helpful.
RE: IT Dept. Open or Closed door policy?
RE: IT Dept. Open or Closed door policy?
One thing that you can do is establish some protocol and get the CEO or CTO or CIO to sign off on it. You can have people simply send in email when they need help or have a question or resource request, but try using forms instead. With forms you can control how to information is collected and you may be able to apply a certain level of automation to reduce the amount of time you invest in each issue.
This has a couple of effects. One, when you control what information they can select in the form, you can eliminate the subjects and issues which are not within your scope. Two, the available options in the form help to educate the users on what the IT department supports. Third, your department has a much better workflow to triage issues. You do, however, need to make sure you follow up on all requests. Establishing a consistent and reliable process for managing incoming support requests is crucial to this working and retaining executive support.
As for forms, I suggest Microsoft's InfoPath. You likely already have it, and it's quite flexible.
Hope that helps!
Tyler
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Tyler Regas - Nerd. Writer.