Reducing Silos in Support

Every company has subject matter experts who can fix problems in a short amount of time. While these people can feel like a great asset to the company for their skills and knowledge, they can also be a liability. If they go on vacation or leave the company there will be a large skillset gap which will need to be addressed, and resolution times may go up when the experts are not around. What can you do to ensure this does not happen?

Reduce silos in your support structure by having a knowledge culture, cross training teams in different subject matter areas, and use a shift left philosophy to allow other teams to solve known issues.

Knowledge

Your biggest ally in being able to solve any given problem which may come up is knowledge. Do you have an organized, easy to search, and up to date knowledge base on how you solve issues? <LINK>Adopting a knowledge sharing mentality<LINK> will ensure as new issues arise or change that the information behind how to solve them is kept up to date. Keep your teams up to date with how to search your knowledge base for issues. This will give them a place to look first without needing to reach out to silos.

Rotate Developers

The more people who are familiar with your code base the better. Try rotating your developers through being the owners of different services as part of a schedule. Not only does this expand the knowledge of code bases across your organization, but it also puts fresh eyes on old problems who might be able to solve them with their new perspective. When problems arise with code bases this gives you a larger audience of people to reach out to for assistance who are familiar with the business and logic rules.

Monitoring Automation with Runbooks

Lastly if you are looking to "shift-left" away from developer / engineering support, you can automate system checks for anomalies and known problems. Add runbooks for when those alerts fire on what to do and how to fix. Make sure to track how often these events occur to know if you need a more permanent fix for a common issue. Instill a culture of when a known issue comes up that cannot be immediately fixed that you add one of these checks in so customers will not see the impact.