7 vitamins for service. How to provide service with a team of motivated employees

When a group of people has a common goal - the successful completion of a project, for example, one of them is not so difficult to create a team. People come together trying to achieve this goal. Let's imagine that the goal is not finite, but stretched in time. For example, providing the service of the required quality is a goal for years, and with motivation and team building everything is somewhat more complicated.



Here are a number of problems that sooner or later confront service teams:

1. tasks on the service are similar to one another - annoying;
2. “Everyone is cutting his own piece”, there is no live communication, there is no team;
3. work has no development and the end is stagnation.

At the service of support and maintenance of applications (including in our company) this is aggravated by the fact that all of the above has to be experienced by programmers who, like creative people, do not accept routine and monotony.
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We are fighting about it like this:

1. The company team constantly take graduates of institutes. No, this does not mean that we are doing student support. Just for many, our project is a starting point in a company, an opportunity to learn from someone else’s code. Some of them remain in the team, and a year later the other becomes quality specialists. In general, we must understand that the service project usually involves a constant rotation of people, and the task of the manager is to bring up a replacement and maintain knowledge, and not to keep people as long as possible. I noticed that programmers who worked on the service when they write code think that someone will support it: they are sensitive to comments and more difficult to accept crutches. Still, some people like to teach students, revealing pedagogical talents.
2. Everyone has a development plan, not just students. We talk together about how a person plans to develop. If our team does not have opportunities for development in the right direction, a transition to another project is possible. I am for the person to get the most out of work and not to do the tasks from which he has already grown.
3. Interchangeability. One project site should know at least two specialists. It’s easier to go on vacation and take on new tasks if the old ones are already boring.
4. More than anywhere else, the service needs to give people time to develop their development or allow them to participate in some other interesting project. Development for mobile devices, internal portal - all this should be given time. In a large company, such projects somehow organically appear themselves, if you do not have a third-party project - you can think of it.
5. Continuous improvements. We had a case when the database load time decreased from several days to a couple of hours with several lines of code. Such things need to celebrate and constantly ask the team to think about it. It is good to set goals for improving certain processes. For example, if you set a goal to reduce the average resolution time of a ticket, interesting problems may be revealed. It was like this: it turned out that quite often users from Germany come to us in German, and we have to ask them to describe the problem again, but in English. If you write “Please describe the problem in English” in the form header, you can improve the performance. It’s amazingly interesting to think about what can go wrong.
6. Daily stand-ups. No more than 15 minutes for 10 people. When I was a developer, I also thought that any meeting was a waste of time. Only I, as a manager, many times had to drive colleagues out of the negotiation room by force 15 minutes later and say that the rally was over, and in the meantime they stood for half an hour and discussed problems that would never have surfaced if they had not been discussed. . Plus, similar joint solutions of problems make a group of people a team and contribute to the rotation of knowledge.
7. Hemification To include adults in the game is a special talent. Those who get more night calls, who first came to the stand-up and who were most often late, can make a humorous competition with amusing prizes.

To summarize, the mission of a manager on such a project, in the absence of a global ultimate goal, is to identify and set several local tasks for people:

1. development of each team member;
2. improvement of specific indicators of service and, as a result, improvement of processes;
3. support and transfer of knowledge, learning new;
4. getting pleasure from work. I will leave it here as a goal, because it is really important, especially in the service.

By fkleto4ku