I asked the service desk why Monday mornings were so heavy and got an answer I was not expecting. In a sample week, just under a quarter of everything they handled came from people who are not employed by this company. Hauliers booking collection slots. Agency drivers taken on for a fortnight at a time. Two customers who place their own orders through our portal. A recycling contractor. The engineers of the firm that maintains our racking.
There are four hundred and twelve active logins on that portal and about three hundred and sixty of them belong to somebody else's staff. None of it was a secret. It simply never appeared anywhere, because our tools cannot describe it. A ticket has to be raised against a person, a person has to exist in the human resources feed, and none of these people do, so the desk logged them against a generic account created in 2019 for exactly this purpose by somebody who has long since left. Every report I have ever read about our support demand quietly excluded a fifth of it.
The practical cost is roughly a person and a half of effort a year and a set of promises nobody made. Our desk opens at seven. A haulier wanting a booking amended at half past four in the morning rings the main number printed on the login page, which we never agreed to publish, and gets a voicemail. In February that produced a trailer standing at a depot for three hours and a penalty charge that arrived on the logistics budget rather than mine, which is why nobody had raised it with me.
We fixed the ownership before the tooling. The portal is a service now, with a named owner in logistics rather than in my department, published hours that are honest, and one documented out of hours route for bookings only. External people sit in a directory of their own, and each haulier firm has an administrator who is responsible for their own staff, because they know who works there on any given morning and we never will. The desk can raise a ticket against an organisation. Each contract now states what support the other party actually gets.
Our support model was written for the payroll. The payroll stopped being the list of our users years ago and nobody wrote that down.
– Serguey Shinder
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