How to set up teamwork and keep calm in the Telegram chat rooms, if everything is burning, and everything is in hell
We have troubled work - with the sites that we maintain, something is constantly happening, and we have to react to any accident in 15 minutes - all this in 24/7 mode, seven days a week. Tasks for admins are impossible to plan - it’s hard to imagine such a plan for the week: 25 accidents will happen, and we will eliminate them one by one. About how we are trying to live with this, I want to tell.
What is an accident? It may run out of disk space (or it seems to end soon), the response time may increase. If we say that we will respond in 15 minutes, this means that the administrator on duty must do it in 7-8 minutes. During this time, he receives an alert, confirms that he accepted, investigates it and, if necessary, begins to repair it.
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Now such alerts from 100 to 500 per hour per person. During the day there are more, at night less, on “Black Friday” there are insanely many of them, because online stores for some reason like to start “Black Friday” a day earlier each year, and this is not always planned in advance (every time they say that they will not participate in it at all; one of our clients somehow launched a dispatch to 300 thousand people in half an hour after he said that he did not participate in this “black Friday”, and we received as a result about 900 alerts per hour for three duty administrators).
Our main support work goes through chats (on average, ten minutes can receive ten chats). Neither the ticket system, nor the client should say that something fell, we should notice this first and tell the client. It looks like this:
or so:
In such chat rooms we get up to 50 messages every 10 minutes. Up to eight tasks are put through each chat at the same time. This speeds up the work - if you ask a client to write a task in a ticket, the client will take a long time to formulate it, and then it will take a certain amount of time to formulate this task for the performers correctly. If the client starts talking in the chat, then it can be discussed immediately, and then somehow transferred to the project management system. It is easier for the client to set the task in the dialogue, it is easier for us to try to clarify what he means, but there are certain problems related to the fact that the task in the chat does not look like a full-fledged task for the administrator. The employee has about five such tasks per hour - it may be some kind of configuration change on the server, installing some software, creating an additional backup, etc.
Now we have an average of 90 active chats every day, and the communication in them is uneven over time:
Many tasks arise in chat rooms, and it is difficult to keep track of them, it is very easy to lose them. There are a lot of alerts, we must respond to them on time - otherwise we will break the SLA. Well, in the end, when you get about 500 alerts per hour, you get a little tired, because you need to live with it somehow.
We lived in Skype for a long time. At first it was very bad, then it became very, very bad, then it became very bad. At some point, everyone, and our customers, too, began to switch to Telegrams. And since we had quite a lot of expertise in the development, we decided to try to rewrite it for ourselves so that it solves our problems.
Why we did not accept Telegram, or any other messenger, as it is? None of the developers think that a person can have 80 chats at the same time. On the left in the messenger window shows a small number of chats - not the one we need for our work. In ordinary life, compared to us, a person writes quite rarely. We always keep changing the order of chats, it is at least inconvenient to switch between them (well, it's easy to lose something). According to the list, it is often not clear where we didn’t have time to answer or didn’t answer yet, and where time is approaching, we need to respond urgently.
In our Telegram client, we reduced the height of each chat individually.
They began to track the SLA according to where the client last wrote in the chat, and began to highlight the chats, where you need to respond to us.
Grouped chats according to the need of response, added a function to mark all chats as read. Why did they do it? We accumulate in a day, if an employee is not on duty, about 150 chats in which they wrote something - this is irrelevant.
Especially for me they made a ban on my messages in the tech-chat chat settings. Because sometimes I come there, I try to solve something, they click the check mark, and I don’t have that opportunity anymore.
If a client asks to do something in the chat, the attendant on chat by right-click creates a task from this dialog in Bitrix24 (we also rewrote it for ourselves - based on "Bitrix 24 in a box", it is written in php, it has tickets, API).
The client can add some additional data to the ticket, track the execution, further work is being done there.
The shift attendant has a list of tasks that are now at work. During the day in our SLA, we have to tell the client when we will do this task.
What else did:
Download our Telegram client for Mac OS here , and for Windows here .
People get tired of the insane rhythm of work, so since 2010 (the moment when support for websites became our main service) and before optimizing work communications in Telegram, we have taken many steps that made life easier for our employees and do not let us forget that together we are doing an important thing
We also have a common sense director on staff. Seriously, in the workbook it is written that “the director of common sense”. When someone is trying to do something, they all come to Vita and say: "Victor, we need common sense." By the way, Vitya is actually called Andrey, but his name is Vitya.
What is an accident? It may run out of disk space (or it seems to end soon), the response time may increase. If we say that we will respond in 15 minutes, this means that the administrator on duty must do it in 7-8 minutes. During this time, he receives an alert, confirms that he accepted, investigates it and, if necessary, begins to repair it.
')
Now such alerts from 100 to 500 per hour per person. During the day there are more, at night less, on “Black Friday” there are insanely many of them, because online stores for some reason like to start “Black Friday” a day earlier each year, and this is not always planned in advance (every time they say that they will not participate in it at all; one of our clients somehow launched a dispatch to 300 thousand people in half an hour after he said that he did not participate in this “black Friday”, and we received as a result about 900 alerts per hour for three duty administrators).
Our main support work goes through chats (on average, ten minutes can receive ten chats). Neither the ticket system, nor the client should say that something fell, we should notice this first and tell the client. It looks like this:
or so:
In such chat rooms we get up to 50 messages every 10 minutes. Up to eight tasks are put through each chat at the same time. This speeds up the work - if you ask a client to write a task in a ticket, the client will take a long time to formulate it, and then it will take a certain amount of time to formulate this task for the performers correctly. If the client starts talking in the chat, then it can be discussed immediately, and then somehow transferred to the project management system. It is easier for the client to set the task in the dialogue, it is easier for us to try to clarify what he means, but there are certain problems related to the fact that the task in the chat does not look like a full-fledged task for the administrator. The employee has about five such tasks per hour - it may be some kind of configuration change on the server, installing some software, creating an additional backup, etc.
Now we have an average of 90 active chats every day, and the communication in them is uneven over time:
Many tasks arise in chat rooms, and it is difficult to keep track of them, it is very easy to lose them. There are a lot of alerts, we must respond to them on time - otherwise we will break the SLA. Well, in the end, when you get about 500 alerts per hour, you get a little tired, because you need to live with it somehow.
We lived in Skype for a long time. At first it was very bad, then it became very, very bad, then it became very bad. At some point, everyone, and our customers, too, began to switch to Telegrams. And since we had quite a lot of expertise in the development, we decided to try to rewrite it for ourselves so that it solves our problems.
Why we did not accept Telegram, or any other messenger, as it is? None of the developers think that a person can have 80 chats at the same time. On the left in the messenger window shows a small number of chats - not the one we need for our work. In ordinary life, compared to us, a person writes quite rarely. We always keep changing the order of chats, it is at least inconvenient to switch between them (well, it's easy to lose something). According to the list, it is often not clear where we didn’t have time to answer or didn’t answer yet, and where time is approaching, we need to respond urgently.
In our Telegram client, we reduced the height of each chat individually.
They began to track the SLA according to where the client last wrote in the chat, and began to highlight the chats, where you need to respond to us.
Grouped chats according to the need of response, added a function to mark all chats as read. Why did they do it? We accumulate in a day, if an employee is not on duty, about 150 chats in which they wrote something - this is irrelevant.
Especially for me they made a ban on my messages in the tech-chat chat settings. Because sometimes I come there, I try to solve something, they click the check mark, and I don’t have that opportunity anymore.
If a client asks to do something in the chat, the attendant on chat by right-click creates a task from this dialog in Bitrix24 (we also rewrote it for ourselves - based on "Bitrix 24 in a box", it is written in php, it has tickets, API).
The client can add some additional data to the ticket, track the execution, further work is being done there.
The shift attendant has a list of tasks that are now at work. During the day in our SLA, we have to tell the client when we will do this task.
What else did:
- "Asterisk": if you want not to forget about the chat (for example, it has some information to which you need to return), then you can mark it with an asterisk, and later notice and return;
- setting “disable preview creation” for links (in order not to clutter the chat with thumbnails);
- several settings that Telegram himself made later - fixed chats, the setting “do not notify me when I type”.
Download our Telegram client for Mac OS here , and for Windows here .
People get tired of the insane rhythm of work, so since 2010 (the moment when support for websites became our main service) and before optimizing work communications in Telegram, we have taken many steps that made life easier for our employees and do not let us forget that together we are doing an important thing
- hired more people and introduced eight-hour shifts for everyone to sleep (and there were times when they didn't have time);
- started to maintain a knowledge base and a history of incidents in order to transfer knowledge to newcomers;
- they formalized the work of support (they made a duty schedule, rules for setting tasks, checklists);
- opened offices in other time zones (the main one is in Irkutsk, two more - in Moscow and St. Petersburg)
- We switch employees to different tasks, if they are tired and want development - there are duty administrators who work with burning tasks, administrators for more long-term and complex tasks, administrators in the back office who do our internal tasks (we have our own monitoring system, systems backups, Isolate, etc.), and more recently, the R & D department - will soon tell you what he does.
We also have a common sense director on staff. Seriously, in the workbook it is written that “the director of common sense”. When someone is trying to do something, they all come to Vita and say: "Victor, we need common sense." By the way, Vitya is actually called Andrey, but his name is Vitya.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/335446/
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