Do you ever feel like your IT department is stuck on the hamster wheel that only seems to spin faster?  When you solve one problem, three more have been added to your list.  And your boss or customers don’t understand why you can’t keep up, or worse yet, they assume your inept or unwilling.

In IT we often find ourselves in a rat race that seems never ending.  Not only are we constantly attempting to keep up with what we are expected to support, it seems that each day more and more projects and services are being added to our already overwhelming list.

When faced with this dilemma in our team I came up with the concept of Pushing It Down the Stack.  Pushing what exactly?  Anything and everything.

IT service management has attempted to do just that, manage our services.  While they do a good job of helping your team to assess exactly what it is doing and work with customers to set expectations, one of the largest hurdles if figuring out how to do more with the same resources.

When there is no plan to expand your team or resources anytime in the near future, and yet your organization’s demands continue to grow, you need an approach to reduce the amount of time on what you’re doing now, without reducing services.

So, what is Pushing It Down the Stack, and how does it help? Here is a graphic that helps illustrate the point:

Tasks that require your most attention and time are at the top.  As you modify the task to push it down the less effort it takes to complete.  It’s inevitable that much of your daily routine will be at the top, and that’s OK for brainstorming or executing vision.  But it’s not OK for day to day routine tasks.  These are the ones that will kill the productivity level of any team.  It’s your goal to push these routine tasks as far down the stack as possible.

Here is a brief explanation with an example of what might occur at each level:

Complete Attention:

These tasks are those that you cannot help but put your full attention on.  The instant you answer the phone, if a server has gone down or you are designing your 1:1 initiative, you’re at the top of the stack.  In the case of a down server, it’s all hands on deck until you can bring that service back online.

How to push these tasks down:

In the case of service outages, the best plan is to be proactive.  Find out why the service failed and setup a monitoring system or procedures to prevent the service from failing.  For support phone calls, look into an on demand or knowledge base to help users get services or find solutions at their convenience.

Temporary Solution:

These are tasks that frequently and sporadically require your attention, but fortunately you have a work around or some shortcut to make it faster to complete.  This might be a server that you need to manually reboot when it frequently freezes or perhaps resetting a user’s password if you don’t have a password reset service.

How to push these tasks down:

A workaround is often a Band-Aid at best.  You’re most likely attacking the symptom, not solving the problem.  This means that while it’s not requiring as much of your attention, you’re not getting rid of it.  Take some time to actually identify the issues that result in the failure.

For on demand services like password resets, look for self-service tools that allow your users to get the help they need without any intervention from your team.

Repeatable Manual Process:

This might be a recurring task that you do on a consistent basis.  It still requires your manual involvement, but it’s routine and can be handled with little mental effort.  This might be a morning task like uploading a list of students to your online learning management software or swapping out backup tapes.

How to push these tasks down:

Unfortunately, you cannot always get these off your plate.  Sometimes there is no alternative, such as the example above when a vendor simply does not provide an automated alternative.  Some options in these cases are to switch vendors or encourage them to provide an automated alternative that their competitors might already boast.

To eliminate this in the future it is worthwhile to work with your organization to develop requirements, requiring any new vendors to provide secure and automated ways to send data. Other options are to enlist 3^rd party automation tools or custom development that help turn manual tasks into routine functions that might mimic human involvement.

Self Help\On Demand:

This is the golden level for anything that your users might require on demand, but don’t require your involvement.  This might be a password reset tool, some system that allows them to install organization software on demand or even help documents that they can find to solve their problem without having to contact IT.

Maintaining a healthy and active knowledge base and installing self-service tools are great ways to get to this level.

Automation\Monitoring:

This is the holy grail and what you always want to try to achieve.  This is the “set it and forget it” level.  Do you have data that needs to be integrated between systems regularly?  Automate it. Do you have multiple systems requiring user accounts? Synchronize your systems to one user management system such as Active Directory, Google Apps, LDAP sources, or SSO services.  Do you have reporting tools or services that you can monitor?  Great, set your thresholds and forget them.  Let them tell you when they need attention, otherwise, forget them.

In the end your attention will always be required somewhere.  When you are able to reduce or eliminate any mundane tasks it allows you to devote your time and focus to projects or requests that use your talents to your full potential.  This is where you plan and execute your vision.

But it goes even beyond increasing your capacity, it also improves your organization’s speed and productivity.  The less your users have to call you the faster they get the help they need.  If the tools they want are readily available, they don’t have to wait for someone to assist them. If service is more reliable and always available, the more they are able to achieve as well.

How are some ways that you have been able to “Push It Down the Stack?”