On Call

Part of my unofficial job title is trying to figure out how to solve fundamental problems.  Fundamental problems are those that cause a collection of other issues.  One such issue is replacing the battery pack in a Ruby.  Replace the battery pack, and then you have fewer boot fix issues.  Getting rid of Buypak 6.00.06 seems to be one as well.  Maybe Buypak 6.00.10, too.

Anyways, solving those kind of issues involves a lot of thinking and some decent analytic software.  We use SysAid for our helpdesk/ticket management software.  It works pretty good.  Anyways, looking at categories of service requests is hard when you have serial offenders of people who don't categorize or assign service requests.  When you've got 100+ open service requests, and around 60 haven't even been given a category, it's hard to deal with the real issues.  With that many open service requests, it's hard to even identify where the real issues are.

I guess I'm used to using intuition and on calls to figure out where issues really exist.  On call is a special time.  I'm not going to lie.  Most of the time, they suck.  It's a soul grinding time of 60-70 hour weeks of nothing but pure panic level.  Everything is a crisis and the world is always falling apart.  Very few of the crisis are real crisis.  But it's a necessary evil.

Almost every on call teaches me something.  Moving in towards network administration, I get less of the day to day breakage and problems that occur.  In many ways, that separates my time away from crisis to solving bigger problems with longer term solutions.  But it is hard to solve long term problems if you don't know what those problems are.

Its fundamental root problems that need solved to really make a difference in the amount of service requests.  If you don't solve those problems, then you don't decrease the work order load.  Is the issue training?  Or is the issue user error?  Some user error issues can be traced to training issues.  Others can be traced to bad software.  It's a matter of figuring out which is the real issue.

What does anyone else do to solve fundamental issues?  What about on calls?