Define IT Support
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Hi Guys I'm trying to get a general definition for the term "IT Support" that is, what are the job roles of the IT Support staff at your work. Basically, I manage a group of developers and at times we are all required to do some level of IT Support. We hate it, but its a part of the job description so apart from pulling faces, theres nothing much we can do. However for a long time now, we have been providing what I think is administrative support, i.e hellping users with basic MS Word usage such as setting paper margins, setting page numbers on documents, placing images in word documents etc. We have a team of young administrators and an admin manager and I believe it is their responsibility to provide this level of support. Recently the admin manager approached one of my developers to split a word document into several pages, Im thinking WTF.:mad: To cut a long story short, I am preparing for war with my managers to dispute the definition of IT Support. Ive tried to find a general description of IT Support on the internet with no luck. My developers are having to stop working on their projects to do this level of support quite frequently and the stress is begining to show. Can you imagine, your trying to debug a script and someone comes and tells you, their PC is not working becuase - when they type something in the middle of a sentance it deletes everything infront of the caret. I almost had a fit when I heard that one. It was from the admin manager. If anyone can offer any advice I would greatly appreciate it. :)
So there are quite a few replies to this so apologies if I repeat some of what others have said. Having worked in this world of IT Support for going on 10 years and also working very closely with Dev teams, here is pretty high level view on things. You have two main areas of IT, Development and Operations. Development: Building systems for the purpose of either making or saving a company money etc. Operations: Making sure those systems are up and running (IT Operations is a very broad area and includes Desktop, Networking, Server admin AND support). Support generally falls under Operations, however there are different levels of support, of which Development is a part of. Here is what I hope is a clear definition of those levels. Level 1 (Help Desk) - IT Operations junior responding when "customers" have a problem with something IT related. "Customers" in IT terms includes your internal staff. Level 2 (Junior Operations) - Or in some cases the ONLY Admin / Network / Desktop guy. The guy the 1st Level guys turn to when they can't fix it. Level 3 (Senior Operations) - The guy the 2nd level guys go to when they can't figure it out (I like the guys who point the 2nd level guys in the right direction and in turn spreading the knowledge). Level 4 (Development) - The supplier of the system! If something is that broken, these guys are going to have to be called in. Now Level 1 can blur with Level 2 a bit when the junior guys aquire more knowledge and skills. The same can be said of Level 2 and Level 3. This tends to be the career path. So now that you have read all that, the short answer: You and your team are Development. Unless the problem is with the system you developed, it's not your problem! Something to use in your argument would be the $$ amount it costs the company everytime your team get pulled away on a 1st or 2nd level support problem. And we are not just talking about the cost of the dev teams time, we're talking the potential loss of revenue because a product is not complete or late being delivered etc. It's all about the Benjamins! P.S. Your admin manager who doesn't know what the insert key does isn't an Admin, they are a Manager. My old directory of IT wasn't that bad, but came out with some good ones. However they ran the IT Department extreamly well.
TimmyFox