A new direction takes support to new levels

In the digital world, developers are sacred. They weave their magic and build things most of us can only dream of. But unless customers ideas and system issues are being addressed, that developer magic can be wasted.

That’s where the support team comes in.

In many places though, despite its importance, being placed in the support team is viewed negatively.

In October 2017, following a spate of system-wide outages and other issues, Lodgement and API’s Odyssey team became the new support team. Their mission? Well, according to the team’s new Iteration Manager, David McKenzie, it was a little unclear.

“At the time, the team had been moved from development to support and was a little unclear why. They were flooded with fixes and were under the pump as outages piled on the pressure,” said McKenzie.

Morale was low and according to research conducted by consulting firm Elabor8, the team felt they had little influence on things, either in terms of providing value for customers or their working environment, couldn’t get fixes out quickly enough and lacked direction.     

A new way forward

Clearly, changes were needed.

A new Iteration Manager, James Gallagher – who has now moved to another team on the train - started and took the time to understand the team’s pain points, as well as their wider purpose.

Gallagher reintroduced proper Agile methodology and led a lot of team conversations about owning solutions end-to-end to help the team make decisions quickly and easily,

“The team wanted to feel a lot more empowered to prioritise their workload on what they felt needed to be done, so they could provide real value to the wider organisation and the customer,” said McKenzie.

“A lot of work went in to streamline how things were prioritised on the backlog. The team has a lot more control now.”

The development train improved efficiency dramatically, with deployments occurring daily. This reduced cycle times, so the support team could get fixes and enhancements out a lot quicker, thus eliminating a huge pain point.

The future is bright

Elabor8 conducted a similar team health check in May 2018 and found a dramatic increase in all areas. The team was much happier and now feel they have the power to work on what is best for the customer, the company and for themselves.

“We run a fortnightly prioritisation session and see what the rest of the train is doing so we can enhance it even more,” said McKenzie.

McKenzie says that management has been incredibly supportive and gives the team the freedom work on their ‘wish list’ of projects, as long as they fit in with the rest of the workload.

“We couldn’t have done it without good leadership within the team and in the wider train. Their support allows us to really work on things we think are of the highest value. Right now, we’re looking at working on automating bulk return labels, putting in proper warnings for incidents, and speeding up the overall environment. We try to make it fun and interesting, collaborative and creative.” adds McKenzie.

Originally published at auspost.com.au