There’s an interesting blog post on the official Second Life blog : An Inside Look at How The Ops Team Collaborates. Many a support person the world over will notice the lack of references to expletives, head desking, people asking silly questions and people not wanting to part with information because it will delay them in their aim of fixing the problem, even though that short delay means the helpdesk can provide information to end users if end users contact them.
The use of IRC is strong at Linden Lab and the blog post makes a very strong point as to why communications such as that are pretty damn important :
Running an incident response in a chat channel is also an incredibly effective way of passively disseminating information to a wide audience. A large number of people can quietly lurk in a chat channel unlike in a physical space. More formal status updates to various parties, like support, are of course sometimes necessary but enabling those parties to follow along in real time gives them context that would not otherwise be conveyed in a terse status report.
As a final bonus, we are able to respond to a problem at peak efficiency regardless of where anyone is at that moment. Issues don’t wait for office hours to crop up. Being a distributed team, this is really our only option, but it rocks that being distributed is an advantage in incident response.
Whereas in smaller operations the chat is more likely to be by telephone or shouted across the office, with people openly denying there’s a problem whilst the helpdesk phones are ringing red hot. Then there’s the pause, the WTF moment, the end of the denial, the pass the parcel finger of blame experience and then eventually the fix. Then you have the post-mortem which involves everyone agreeing to be more organised and in full communication mode if this happens again, and then forgetting that was ever said five minutes later.
Linden Lab seem to be very well organised and the fact that they use chat means the existence of chat logs, the use of which are explained well in the blog post. Linden Lab can look back over the logs to identify what exactly happened, they can even educate new staff by letting them read old logs too.
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