Jamie – IT Manager

Meet Jamie. She's an IT Manager at Cloud-y, a cloud-based file sharing service. Jamie's team is responsible for building and supporting Cloud-y's tech stack. Six months ago, her team adopted Slack. Explore below to see how it changed the way they work.

🔍  Finding answers

Jamie's small team is responsible for supporting the IT needs of ~1000 employees. Often, it feels like all of their time is spent reacting to support requests. 

Before Slack

After Slack

Before Slack, when an employee at Cloud-y had an IT issue, they could:

• Ask the people around them to see if anyone had run into the issue lately.
• Submit a ticket to the IT team.

Because the IT team was so small, it would often take days to resolve employee issues, whether or not it actually required the help of a specialist.

📂  Next up: Click the 'After Slack' tab 

Using Slack, Jamie's team is able to leverage the knowledge of all employees at the company, freeing up time for the IT team to focus on strategic work:

• They have a rule to  search first before asking a question in Slack.
• They have a  public channel called #help-it, where employees can post IT-related questions.
• When someone in the channel (including IT specialists, and fellow employees) knows the answer to a question, they  emoji react with 👀 , to let them know they're looking into it, and a ✅  when resolved.
• Team members use  mentions to call attention to subject-matter experts.

🎉 You're done! Move onto the next workflow.

👥  Reducing time in meetings

Jamie's team is currently implementing a new CRM at Cloud-y, and it's important that they stay on the same page.

Before Slack

After Slack

Before Slack, the team held a daily standup to touch base; however, Jamie often found these meetings to be a waste of time:

• Most of the time was just spent listening to personal updates.
• There was often no set agenda.

As she sat through these meetings, she could hardly pay attention, knowing that support questions about the new CRM were piling up in her queue.

Using Slack, Jamie's team has improved the efficiency of their meetings, allowing them to spend more time supporting their users:

• For daily standups, the team has a weekly  Slackbot reminder that triggers every day at 9am.
• When it's necessary to meet in person, the meeting lead shares an agenda as an  editable Post in the #it-team channel ahead of time.

🎯 Making better decisions

Jamie's team is responsible for all IT-buying decisions at Cloud-y. They need to take into account the needs of many stakeholders when working with vendors.

Before Slack

After Slack

Before Slack, when Jamie needed feedback on a proposal from a vendor, she could:

• Try to find a time for all relevant stakeholders to meet.
• Send an email to all stakeholders with a request for feedback.

This resulted in unnecessary delays, meaning it would take longer to get vital tools in the hands of Cloud-y's users.

Using Slack, Jamie is able to quickly pull stakeholders together to gather feedback on proposals, and make better decisions.

• They have a  public channel called #it-purchasing where the IT team can request feedback from the team on proposals from vendors.
• Stakeholders  emoji react to requests for feedback, to let the IT team know they've seen it.
• Suggestions are made using  threads, keeping conversations organized.

📰 Keeping the team informed

Inevitably, Cloud-y experiences service interruptions from time to time. Jamie is responsible for keeping affected parties in the loop. 

Before Slack

After Slack

Before Slack, when Jamie needed to send an alert about a service interruption, she had two options:

• Send an email to the distribution list for the affected teams.
• Update the service status site on Cloud-y's intranet.

These alerts would often be missed or ignored, resulting in frustrated users and an increased volume of internal help tickets.

Using Slack, Jamie can easily target service updates to the right audience:

• Each department has an  #announcements channel for important updates, with a strict reactions only policy.
• Service alerts are  pinned to the channel for easy reference, and then unpinned when complete.

🙇 Centralizing information

Jamie's team receives support requests from users across the business, and it's important that they're able to spot trends easily.  

Before Slack

After Slack

Before Slack, it was challenging for Jamie's team to spot trends that might lead them to explore a proactive fix:

• Tickets were picked up in the order that they were submitted, meaning different specialists would often be troubleshooting the same issue.
• Team leads would have to login to the ticketing software to see what kinds of issues were being reported, leading to a loss in productivity due to context switching.

Because it was challenging for Jamie's team to spot trends; they wasted time reacting to support requests, rather than quickly addressing the root cause.

Using Slack, all tickets are piped into a Slack channel, allowing the team to notice trends quickly, and get them fixed:

• The team installed their customer support app from the  Slack App Directory.
• By viewing all tickets in one place, trends become obvious and simpler to address. 

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