Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Techies in with the Workers?

One of the big problems facing any high tech work environment is the decision to either place the support people - the techies - in the same area as the workers or do you put them all in one area where the manager can watch over them?
 
By scattering people around the org you lose - on paper - the efficiency of a central dispatch to keep the people busy you have busy all the time. This practice is that you only have enough people to just cover all the work and as things break you send them off to fix things.
 
The other method is to put the techs in with the worker so they are always around and can fix things as they see them break, do preventive maintenance, and to always know what the workers are doing and thus get ahead of the problems before they are called in. (It is known that many people will not call in a minor problem, but if a person shows up they will then tell them about other problems.)
 
However all these efficiency people who want centralized dispatched techies never account for the intelligence that comes from having people always in the field talking with the workers to find out what really is going on and to experience the problems - and not have to wait for some other back end person to get around to write a data analysis program to query all the help desk calls to detect a pattern - the people doing the work can see patterns a lot faster than any data analysis person.
 
The ability to get in on hallway conversations, over hear people working on problems, or just educating people on how to do things better GAINS more efficiencies than a centralized techie concentration - but the experts never want to measure that!