Article ID: BM032
Category: Business and Management
Title: Out-of-Hours Service Need - Fact or Fad?

Nine-to-five was already becoming an outdated concept when Dolly Parton so memorably fronted the movie of the same name. In most places where I've worked, a nine in the morning start is a five-thirty finish, but that too cannot be said to be routine. We are professionals, and we work until the job is done, which means that sometimes we skip lunch and perhaps don't leave the office until nearer six, and on occasion, later still. We get the job done and if that means working a bit later, so be it.

But what if the job never gets done? For all the single-goal projects we in IT Services may conduct, these jobs-to-be-done are dwarfed by the amount of effort we commit to meeting a constant, virtually timeless demand for our main services. This work goes on for ever. It is never complete. There is always another machine to be installed, another user to be trained, another problem to be solved.

It sometimes feels like we could work until midnight every night and the demand would still not be satisfied. That's true. As long as your service is free at the point of delivery, it will get used for as long as you care to offer it. Look at it another way. In your local pub, the eleven o'clock bell now no longer means that you have to finish your drink and leave. When that bell rings, it now means that that all drinks are free of charge. Fancy another?

In many companies, the indication that IT Services may have to extend its hours of opening comes from the users. Some of them get in early to avoid the traffic, stay late because they've so much to do, shift their hours to make it easier for them to drop the kids off at school, shorten some days and lengthen others to make best use of their flexitime and so on. IT Services may take a pragmatic view. This is when our customers are around, we ought to be available to them. Perhaps we should extend our operation times. This is what I call 'flexibility' OOH (Out-of-hours).

A more commercial reason is often the need to support another time zone. In Europe, we are relatively lucky having so much of the continent's population in only two time zones (and in fact, if the UK and Ireland thought like Spain and Portugal, those could be reduced to one, but that's a separate issue). In the USA, supporting across time zones is a little trickier, depending on where Head Office is in relation to the regional offices. A service desk in California looking after the normal working day of the whole country would have to up and running at five or six in the morning. Putting the desk in New York on the other hand means a slightly more civilized extension of the working day to eight or nine in the evening with the Californians only beginning to call in around lunchtime. OK, your New York service operatives would miss happy hour, but they'd hang up their headsets in time for dinner.

For larger companies with a real global presence, there will always be a need to face the question of round-the-clock working. Often, some of the world outposts will be too small to warrant dedicated, local IT support and so may look to a distant Head Office to solve the problem. In my experience, local, small offices tend to become very able at looking after their problems, but that does not mean we can safely ignore the issue. An IT problem can render the office totally unproductive, which of course is unacceptable.

So should we go to an out-of-hours service, and to what extent? Of course, if we are supporting other time zones - but it is less obvious where everybody is in the same zone.

I've been asked to address this as a consultant on several occasions. It's tricky, because sometimes there is a real business reason, such as the cost of lost corporate or user productivity in the absence of any IT Service. In cases like these, at least the decision to look at OOH is a no-brainer. But on other sites, I have found the decision less obvious, often because it is obfuscated by politics. I've seen IT Services departments go OOH not because it really was needed - but because vociferous individuals had demanded it and providing it meant a quiet life. A very quiet life as it turned out, with the telephone ringing perhaps three times between 6pm and 10pm. On that occasion, the techs installed a widescreen television next to the service desk and joined the local video library.

There is a bell curve of demand across the day and this must be measured. Of course if the userbase believes the service desk not to be available outside 'normal' hours, then the ends of the curve may be very flat indeed. The alternative approach to 'how necessary is OOH' is to walk the floors after hours. What proportion of the userbase is actually still there? Is that proportion large enough to suggest that if we stayed open late and advertised the fact, the need would materialise?

The usual approach to OOH is the 'on-call' technician, ideally with a broadband connection at home. This will usually take care of most types of 'How do I' and configuration enquiries. Expectation management is crucial of course - the user has to understand that this is a limited, remote-only service because he has chosen to work outside normal hours, and that he cannot necessarily expect the technician to knock on the door any minute now. For the service to be extended to actual presence of a technician, the same as might be expected in normal working hours, it ought to be up to the user community to prove that it is more costly for the company not to provide the service than to provide it.

In the end, the decision to offer OOH or not should be commercial, rather than political. It should not be made just to satisfy the ego of the vociferous but to meet a clear business necessity. If you are being asked to go OOH, make sure the need is genuine. Or you may find yourself insisting that your staff's kids cease to kiss a parent goodnight. And that's something I for one could not do lightly.

Noel Bruton is an independent consultant and trainer who assists IT Services groups and helpdesks to improve the service they provide. Based in the UK, he has a worldwide clientele since establishing his consultancy practice in 1991. He is the author of 'How to Manage the IT Helpdesk - a Guide for User Support Managers' (ISBN 07506 49011) and 'Managing the IT Services Process' ISBN 07506 57235). He writes extensively in the IT press and is a popular speaker on the IT Support conference circuit.

For more information on on Noel Bruton's services, either call +44 (0)1239 811646 or email noel@noelbruton.com.