Create Team Baseball Cards

When triaging issues, inevitably with some issues you will need to reach out beyond the scope of Tier 3 for additional assistance. Who do you reach out to? Who is the specialist in certain areas? Are they available right now to help out? That answer can be easy or tough depending on a few factors.

Create "baseball cards" for your other departments to allow operations to quickly see who the available specialists are in various areas of the company, therefore reducing triage time and interrupts to others.

One great online service is Pingboard as they natively do a great job of creating these for you, asking the right questions, and integrate into your existing employee directories.

If you have new employees it can be patricianly difficult for them to know who to reach out to. This helps them to "break the ice" with other employees by knowing who to reach out to and feeling comfortable about this.

Consideration Factors

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Strategizing who Tier 3 reaches out to for assistance can minimize distractions to other team members and allow for faster resolution of problems. Some factors to consider:

• Who is the expert? This might take some research at first to get all of the information about who the subject matter experts actually are. You might need to get people to agree they are the expert on things and willing to help out. Also their managers might want only certain people to be points of contact.

• Can they be interrupted? Best to work with managers to understand the availability of certain employees. There may be times of the day where they can be free and dedicated for answering questions.

• Scope of who is included. Make sure to include all departments your team reaches out to, not just engineering. In solving issues in the past I have found I needed to reach out to almost every department in the company to be able to solve the issues coming in.

Card Design

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Here are some pieces of information which should be included in your baseball card design:

• Department. Allow people to filter by department on your page for easier searching.

• Application specialities. Which parts of your service is the individual specialized in?

• Technical specialties. Which technical issues can this individual help out with?

• Availability. If this person is not fully available due to other projects, list limitations on how / when they should be contacted.

• Contact information.

Now that you have baseball cards setup, I would setup a monthly or bi-monthly reminder to keep them updated so they remain relevant. If possible ensure this information pulls from a live company directory.

When to "Pull a Card"

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With this information gathered here are the use cases I have found for when operations will need these:

• Normal triage of issues. As the team goes through the ticket queue during the day, they can use these to assemble a specialized team to review an issue.

• Incidents. When there is a major outage or problem, you need to know who your SME's are. Baseball cards help out with picking the players you need fast.