- DRAFT -

April 2007

The advanced Excel class, aka “Excel ‘N’ Finance”, is another staple of the IT curriculum and is gaining popularity. It’s being reccomended in other classes like DOR 101, Finance 101, and MOR Money. There’s even some discussion about adding it as an alternate course for U of Z finance degrees. The class is receiving lots of verbal praise from students and high scores on their evaluations. Since its debut in August, there has been at least one student in attendance each month.

- DRAFT -

We provide excellent service by email/phone/notes/fax, even in person
We provide ‘always available’ support, every day, 24×7
We teach word/excel/outlook or custom one-on-one classes
We help advise on ways to improve how you use software
We provide an online knowledge-base of common computer questions
We have an awesome help desk system that tracks your issues
We maintain the backups of the mission critical data of the businesses
We keep all workstations and servers patched for security
We maintain the firewall and network routers and wireless devices
We improve the connectivity of the business networks
We clean virus and spam from all incoming email messages
We support the phones and cell phones around the ZCoB
We plan for and replace aging equipment
We do future visioning for technology to benefit the bottom lines
We serve as a bridge to various software support people
We translate geek speak into human speak
We manage vendor contracts and recommend renew or replacements
We provide technical expertise in business planning and during ZAP planning
We provide project management assistance
We help build awesome web sites for the Zingerman’s businesses
We host interns and provide them training opportunities
We provide personal advice on buying computers and other goodies
We will do a first take on repairing your home computer

Ron gave us all the monkey of creating a list of service for our department. This list is from an old KB article. I posted it for us to add, change, remove items from the list. Feel free to edit the post or leave comments.

Thanks to the guys who helped me out with the little card-sorting exercise earlier!

I just added a search button on the website. Tried the keyword “cookie” and came up with graham crackers, rugelach and hamentaschen in addition to all the regular cookies (the search word was in the descriptions).

http://zingermansbakehouse.com/content/pages/search.php

Using Mail Order’s award winning Code Red Knockdown as our guide, IT has started Ticket Take-Down.

During our Friday huddles we record the number of tickets still open at the end of the week (EOW) on our DOR board. In the past we would then review and discuss these tickets, but lately we’ve fallen out of this practice.

So, really, this is a re-norming for the IT department. We review EOW tickets and brainstorm ideas and create action steps, in order to help solve long-term or recurring issues. When actions are taken, or solutions implemented we follow up with the user and then discuss the effectiveness of our actions at the next huddle.

It’s only been a week since we started Ticket Take-Down, so it’s hard to fully gauge how well it’s working for us. However, I can say that reviewing EOW tickets again on Fridays makes coming back to them on Monday much easier.

To get D$E 200 - We have to be one of the first 5 to implement a service innovation piloted by another business. The list was handed out during the Spruddle.

To get an additional D$E 100 - We have to show we used BLC to do it.

Our short list of innovations to adopt (I’ve added a couple that I thought of after the huddle):

1. Code Red Knockdown -> Ticket of the Week?

2. Love Thy Retailer -> Last visit date on each computer

3. 10-4 Goes Through Glass -> 4 on-site

4. Keeping Brides from Becoming Bridezillas
-> Logging every issue (that needs more than 2 minutes to solve) into the helpdesk so that we can prioritize tickets better.
-> Making follow-up calls after a ticket has been resolved to see how they’re doing

5. Sample Up -> DIY Tech Support info sheets online or located in every business to help users troubleshoot easy regular issues. Ex. “I can’t print!” - Check if the printer’s turned on. Check if it’s plugged in. And so on…

Okay, some of them are a bit of a stretch. Anybody wanna spearhead the BLC of any of these? What else can we do?

From a web browser, like Internet Explorer, go to http://208.23.159.130/exchange (external)

http://10.10.15.19/exchange/ (internal)

Login as testuser
password: zing
domain: zingermans

Once logged in, you can explore the new web interface and answer the following:

-What is the testuser’s “Out of Office” Message?
-Who’s name is included in the “Island of misfits?”
-What is testuser doing on Tuesday, May 23?
-When is testuser supposed to have completed the task, “make a list of things to do.”?
-Try moving any message from the inbox into the “save for later” folder. How easy/difficult was it?
-Lastly, Post a new message to zingit that includes your real name in the subject and the answers to the above questions and which operating system (ie Windows XP, Macintosh OSX) and which browser you used (ie Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari).

Should we create a domain name for Marketing and Graphics, like what we have for IT? There’s then room, syntactically, for zsn-hr as well. It would allow them to have dedicated resources, like their own wiki or blog.

Or maybe it’s fine to just do it off of Zingtranet?

We even have a vision:

The IT blog is our storehouse for news and ideas. It facilitates information flow within the IT group and with people interested in our work. It’s informative, entertaining and practical. Each member of the IT team contributes to the blog because it is easy to use. We post updates, geek finds, tea notes, and all sorts of interesting topics.

Considering four out of five of the IT staff are Introverts, this is going to be a fun experiment. Let the blogging begin!