How does your work places assign work to it's employees?

[dr_jared88]

I have been working at my current place of employment for over 4 years now supporting our clients corporate networks. I started off loving my job, enjoying what I do and the company I work for. When I first started we were a fair bit smaller and the workload was relatively easy to balance between all of our team. However in the past couple years we have grown rapidly. Our team has doubled and the work load has probably more then quadrupled. Simply put, we have grown too fast and stress levels has gone through the roof not only for me, but all of the other members of my team.

Our biggest issue is how to delegate/assign tickets to members of the team. Since we support multiple customers we used to each have our own customer that we focused on and that worked quite well. However for whatever reason people above me decided this is not how they want us to operate and instead use this new method which basically goes as a rotation where you get hammered with tickets for 4 weeks, and then you do new project based work for 4 weeks. It works terribly and I've brought this up with my manager. His response being that I can't just complain, I need to provide a better solution.

For those that work a similar style job what do you guys do to balance these tickets and projects? What works, what doesn't?

I still enjoy the work I do, but if this environment I'm working in doesn't change soon I will have to find somewhere else to work.

Thanks!

[dirtsniffer]

My place of work is quite different. But each member of the team has their projects that they work on and when small things come up who ever is around takes care of them. It's worked into the project time line.

How it could be applied to you is lets say each team member is required to spend 20 hours a week on tickets. should be fairly easy to track. and then the rest of the time you can spend working on projects.

[Neil4Speed]

Originally posted by dirtsniffer
My place of work is quite different. But each member of the team has their projects that they work on and when small things come up who ever is around takes care of them. It's worked into the project time line.


This is how things work at my place as well, including certain clients who liaison with designated consultants/analysts.

Have you spoke to HR about this? Maybe encourage some Strategic Planning and Realignment and/or Organizational Assessments.

[dr_jared88]

I haven't talked to HR yet but we do have a meeting tomorrow to discuss the current state and I'm looking to bring in my teams thoughts and our recommendations.

One of the biggest reasons why this new system doesn't work is that it removes any chance of moving up. The way it worked before we were split into to groups. We had a group that did the 'queue' work such as problems, incidents and service requests and we had a 'project' team that did projects. This worked well as the role was defined and it gave incentive to work your way out of the queue towards the project team.

[busdepot]

I work in professional services, where there's jobs ranging from 8 hours to 300+ hours. I've found the best way to manage staff is to talk to them and ask them to provide estimates in hours about what their weeks are looking like. Even just having a planning meeting every week goes a long way to keep tabs on your staff to see how everyone's doing.

The stresses of being busy on employees can be brought down a few notches if they all know that supervisors and managers are concerned about their well being and are interested in keeping the work flow manageable. Just, my two cents.