What is the best way to ensure consistent application support performance across your team?

To ensure consistent application support performance within your team, the initial step is to establish well-defined and measurable goals for both individual team members and the team collectively. These objectives should be in harmony with your business objectives, customer expectations, and industry standards. For instance, consider setting goals for: Average Resolution Time, Customer Satisfaction Rate, First Contact Resolution Rate and etc.

For the business to run smoothly all the stakeholders in the project have to be align the business strategy. If the support is for internal client within the same organization the senior leadership can easily follow the guidelines given by the business. However, if the technical support will be given to an external client agreements about expectations and goals have to be define before the project starts to avoid any misunderstandings from each part. Some projects are not very easy to set boundaries because the expectations and goals from the team might be changing for a while until an agreement can be settled with all the stakeholders.

Best I see fit to give clear and measurable goal for the team 1. Explain the importance of the tasks 2. Give the required training to perform the task 3. Set expectation on the delivery and outcome 4. Give the freedom to perform the task 5. Provide guidance and advice when required

Foster a culture of ownership. Encourage team members to take responsibility for their performance. When individuals are proactive in seeking feedback and actively working on improvement, it leads to consistent high performance in application support. This sense of ownership creates a more self-driven and reliable team.

As a coach should be easy to talk to, gain trust within the team and be able to jump in and help them on hard tasks. 1. Have regular one on one sessions with each team member 2. Give credit where credit should be given 3. Do not embarrass members in-front of the whole team by picking on things that went wrong. Handle them privately, but talk about it so no one is felt uneasy about it. 4. Encourage team to give feed back to you on the peers and manager level

Encourage cross-functional learning. Facilitate opportunities for team members to understand different aspects of application support. This broadens their skill set, promotes collaboration, and ensures a well-rounded approach to consistent performance.

Basic training should be provided to each team member to do their daily work. Application specific training should be provided with the need to understand and trouble shoot issues Training for individuals who want to update their skills and knowledge should be given the chance to develop those skills. They should not be felt like they are stuck to one particular area.

You need to plan to have a diverse team not only geographically and cultural but also plan to have different profiles within your team. By having different profiles you will have experts in many technologies working together to resolve any issue as they might need support from each other expertise. Furthermore, I totally recommend you foster recognition among your team, for example, when a member of your team goes beyond of his duties as another mate might be off or unavailable. Always try to use tools that help the team work together like Teams or Slack to communicate, Sharepoint or Confluence to have any documentation or standard operating procedures (SOPs) and the list goes on..

Evaluating your team should not be a yearly performance review. I truly believe you should be able to measure your team performance at least every week and I do not mean micromanaging. We can have a tracker or any other solution where your team members can update their efforts and how the project is doing. By implementing this solution in your team you will be half way to present these results and efforts to your clients and/or leadership to update how the team is doing. As well, it will help you to understand the velocity of your team and find the gaps or opportunity areas if any.

Consistent IT support is key! Regular training sharpens our skills, and detailed guides are always at hand. We follow SOPs for that extra touch of consistency and love sharing insights. Metrics help us track and improve, and we’re big on feedback. Our collaboration tools keep us seamlessly connected, and cross-training ensures diverse skills. We’re all about solving issues consistently, meeting SLAs, and fostering a positive team vibe. Regular reviews, a touch of automation, and a strong customer-centric approach round up our approach!