This is an excerpt from the UC Optimization Guide for Pros available download here. This extract is taken from the chapter on Energizing your UC team and elevating productivity.
Q: What's the best way to cut down on monitoring and troubleshooting hours in UC?
A: Know your tools and have efficient and practical processes around how to use them to triage and troubleshoot issues in the environment. Prognosis is a great tool, but only if the people looking at it know how to use it and drill down efficiently.
We have a resource who reviews those alerts while checking system health from Prognosis daily and can bubble up any minor alerts worth noting. This reduces the noise/frequency of tickets that the Ops teams process, so they can focus on higher priorities while ensuring nothing gets missed.
Q: How do you make sure your UC dashboards are fit for purpose?
A: We've modified the dashboard display to ensure only systems deployed are visible in the navigation pane. We've customized the visible default fields that display in many dashboards to show only relevant data. We also have members create and use both custom key displays as well as purpose-built mashups.
Q: How could Operations Managers be wasting employee time?
A: Treating or testing for symptoms rather than identifying and treating root cause. I once had a director who would test trunks for possible issues by having much of his staff make lots and lots of test calls and report any bad calls and see if they matched customer complaints. Highly inefficient. If you don't have an established process to deal with a particular type of issue, managers need to be open to their team's ideas on efficient and logical ways to troubleshoot.
Q: What are the best ways to energize your UC team?
A: Reward and recognition. Tout their accomplishments in staff calls or department meetings. Send shout-out emails to the department that praise them for work on a project or tough issue. Show them that the praise is real, and recognized, and how it's made a difference by saving money (by preventing lost revenue). They do make a difference and they need to know it.
