Make Desktop Great Again!

 

The new desktop manager confided to me when he applied for the position was that he would “Make Desktop Great Again!”.   He was referring to my time as manager of the Desktop Mobile Team.

Somehow, I remember the difficulties, but he remembered something else. When I took over desktop, my preexisting relationships with corporate and field personal was extended greatly.  I sat down into the chair in March with a yearly refresh/deployment already in progress and an  iPad  deployment that was being rushed to all sales people in hopes of changing the experience they had with Blackberry Hardware.  There were many difficulties with this position over the following four years but my ex-employee and soon to be Desktop Manager reminded me of his view.

In the time I took over, I dug into understanding what the job entailed and tried with, varying level of success, to respond to the curve balls and, at times, pure insanity that came my way.  I began to call locations and speak to all levels of Management. I asked questions about their service tickets and requests to better understand what they needed. With regard to the hardware and software issues my team educated and informed me so that as a result, I learned much about a job I had never previously done.  As soon as we were done with our iPad roll out, it was changed to maintenance effort as no one considered the ramifications and support needed to remotely work with people to upgrade IOS, Applications, download new applications (when you don’t have the password- that was tough!) etc. So I dug in and helped the team support the field through days turning into weeks of upgrades. I learned a lot and over this time “met” a lot of people.  I worked very diligently to build relationships and be the person that the field called when they had a problem. In fact, they began to rely on me to help give them direction on where /who to talk to about other issues. I answered their questions and they knew they could rely on me to refer them to the right person or take the time to find out who that person is. People began to come over when visiting corporate and say hello and meet myself and my team members.  The training people came over each day and gave us cookies/fruit and cakes at the end of the day. We had a steady flow of thank you notifications to Management that showed that this team was all about Customer Service and doing the right thing when no one was looking. We treated everyone the same – CEO to Maintenance personnel at the locations. Everyone got the same support. Sometimes tickets got lost, the work done in a less than stellar fashion, people went on vacation, or we got overwhelmed with tickets when larger problems occurred, and we could not give the individual tickets the attention they deserved.   People generally understood because we communicated with them, called them, emailed them, made sure that people knew we were there for them.

The Manager went on to say that when I left all this stopped.  The team and the department went back into the same dark age it was in before I took over.

There is much I would have improved if I could have – I practiced more than my share of Intelligent Disobedience…. But what was lost on me until I spoke with the manager, was how much I had improved the team – even if just for a short while.