I have spent the past two summers and winters working as an IT Consultant at a New York City law firm. I worked with five other guys to solve computer problems and upgrade systems for the two hundred attorneys in our office. Our goal was to make the company's computer systems run as smoothly as possible in order to maximize the efficiency of the lawyers. When there was a technological problem on our end, that dug into the hours that attorneys could bill to their clients.
I specialized in repairing and upgrading Blackberries, as well as in printer repair. Most of the information needed to do my job I kept in my head, an internal representation. I didn't need to look up how to activate a Blackberry for a foreign country, or which component to replace when the printer is blurring it's output. That didn't mean, however, that I didn't rely on external representations as well. For example, other members of the team knew information about Blackberries, and I could call on their expertise if I need assistance. Their memories were an external representation.
And while I was capable of remembering most of my job functions, IT work consists of so many aspects, that it is hard to keep them all straight in one's head. Whenever I would devise a new solution, even if I believed it so simple that I could remember it later, I would create an external representation in the form of a word document that I could look up. This became a pattern at work. All five of us would create help sheets, and using these sheets meant that we could help someone complete their work, or fill in for them when they were out sick. More importantly, these external representations meant that I could complete tasks of which I knew little about, which allows us to run more tasks as parallel.
In order to complete our tasks, we took these internal and external representations and transformed them into solutions. While we did complete tightly coupled tasks on occasion, for the most part, our day-to-day work was loosely coupled. As is clear from above, we could proceed easily in parallel for most of our jobs, and only rarely would our work rely on each other. This was very efficient, and maximized our resources.
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I used to do some IT work too, and you're right about it sometimes being hard to keep every solution in your mind (or to actually know every solution). That was an excellent idea creating the external representation sheets.
ReplyDeleteAt my place, we used to look through a computerized ticket system (that held a record of all e-mail communication with clients and IT tech diagnostic report updates), but having single-function, step-by-step help sheets seems like an even more organized way of providing easy-access solution guides.
Spreading the staff out for parallel processing (whenever you can) is great for productivity.
I wonder if, at some point in time, your activities become so "loosely coupled" that you're not even working in a group anymore. Are there certain protocol or procedures that each team member has to go through?
ReplyDeleteYou mention that you've done some external representation in writing up Word documents, but is this done in a systematic enough way for you to build off of each other's past experiences? Otherwise, it seems like you are all independent agents of IT with little group dynamic.