GitLab Support Global Groups, 29 Apr 2022

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From YouTube: GitLab Support Global Groups - Introduction

Description

Introduction to what GitLab Support calls "Support Global Groups," as deployed to the entire Support Team in May of 2022

A

Hi there, my name is ryan castro and today I'll be part of the team. That's talking about the upcoming support global groups rollout and how it affects you. I was part of the test group for the initial rollout back in january. I noticed right away the collaboration. Increased stress, decreased and frt improved across the board for every region that was participating.

A

It was a huge relief to know that I had a team that was looking at a set of tickets alongside of me, and we could easily break down who could take high priority or challenging tickets before sla became an issue now a major change, the way the teams work can come with questions this video and some of the materials that we're distributing should be able to answer any questions that you might have. You can also look up one of our sgg chat groups in slack and ask their directly we'd be happy to answer.

B

Hello, my name is andrew conrad support, engineer in the mayor and I'd like to introduce the concept of support global groups, so everyone's going to be in a group with the exception of us, fed and l r, and each of these groups will be composed of support engineers across every region.

B

So each one will also have its own zendesk need to work out of and slack channel to collaborate it. The zendesk view is going to have incoming tickets evenly distributed across them using a round robin distribution, and each one will be visible to everyone.

B

The slack channel that is also able to be joined by everyone, but the purpose of it is to work within your group to manage that industry and just generally make sure the tickets there are being handled well.

B

So how that works exactly will depend on your group, because you're able to self-determine what you would like to do with that. Some groups will have different processes, but generally in the smaller setting, you're able to work together and decide what happens to all those tickets.

B

So now that you know what support global groups are, I would like to pass this along to daniel, who can tell you more about why this will work thanks.

C

Andrew I'm daniel a support engineer in emea and part of the ginkgo support global group today I'll go over the key points that, in my opinion, make the sdgs an improvement when compared to a previous monolithic approach, the number one is divide and conquer, and it means that it breaks one big problem and divides it into smaller, more manageable copies of itself.

C

Each group has members in the media, apac and aimer, and a smaller amount of tickets proportional to its number of engineers. This helps reduce stress, bystander effect and also solves the sea of red problem, where a lot of reached tickets would show up in the queue at a given deck number two is more collab.

C

Each group has its own select, channel and zendesk fields where all tickets can be seen whether they have an assignee or not. This brings back intra and inter region collaboration and allows us to cover for team members on pto or whenever needed. We are also encouraged to collaborate between groups, and I believe that will happen a lot more when it gets rolled out to the whole sporting.

C

Number three is that we have one goal and that is to have no breached tickets. So each group's primary goal is having a bridgeless healthy queue.

C

This becomes, and this becomes much more feasible when the scope is reduced to a more manageable level, and it also feels good to see that our individual efforts are having a noticeable effect towards that goal and are actually able to make a dent on the queue.

C

Number four is that we can have our custom processes and workflows, so each group is free to figure out their own workflows, group dynamics, collaboration and communication methods that work for them. This is very empowering but challenging at the same time and will probably remain a moving target for most groups, as it has been for our group. Even now.

C

We also have sync meetings where we discuss what works, what doesn't and our experiences with different approaches, and so far it's been a lot of fun figuring all of the stuff out, and those were the main aspects that were most noticeable to me during the short time we have been trialing, gingko, there's probably much more to be said than done, but for now I'll pass the word to ben who's, currently helping cover the apec hours of the gingko global group.

D

Thanks for that daniel now, what I wanted to talk about, or at least display a little bit more visually, is um how you could consider the sport global support global groups in terms of uh in comparison to our current self, which is more time zone based. You know how we have the three current regions. So, um with our current support regions, we mainly cater to time zones and that's more along longitudinal lines across the earth.

D

um Now we can sort of see you know if we look at this example, is we've got apac, mia and amir, and essentially, what we have is um with each team currently, because we have such large groups is, at the end of each region's working day, we're sort of doing a bit of a push pushing everything to the next region. So you can sort of see. Imagine you know, as uh as we sort of follow the sun.

D

You know each region is doing a huge push to try and get to the next region and then try and get to the next region and because the groups are so large, it can impact in some ways in terms of trying to hand over things uh nicely. You know in a smooth process, especially with such large groups and large teams. So um what we can look at instead is in um instead of longitudinal lines, let's consider latitude in the lines.

D

So, if we take a look at this example is if we actually had lines that went across the earth, um I guess you could say like north to south, uh metaphorically speaking, um it would actually mean that we can divide the support teams into smaller groups that are actually designed already to sort of follow the sun or at least follow a sort of follow a pattern as sort of a across the globe.

D

So instead, for example, we would have us have a few smaller groups that are actually already positioned to be able to hand over tickets or at least collaborate asynchronously uh sort of you know as they sort of move across the uh move across the earth. Just like that, so using ginkgo as an example we're not actually all in a particular latitude in the area, but we can still represent that in terms of what we do.

D

So you can see here that this is a bit of a distribution in terms of where all the ginkgo team members are across the globe, um but we can still see here that we actually have around the globe coverage for working on tickets, so that was something that was high priority or something that we needed. Someone to keep an eye on for us outside of our usual working region would actually be able to.

D

You know continue that and actually go across the globe just like that, which is uh which is really handy, which is uh really good to have now. Just lastly, from myself is a few benefits that I've found.

D

You know some of the other team members may have already touched on a few of these points, but I think there's definitely the less chance of what we call the bystander effects um when you say start your working day or even when you start working week with a smaller team, you're, more able to easily identify tickets that need to be actioned, um which is primarily because you know you're not worried about you know am I looking at this while someone else is looking at this, and you know that there's more of a focused viewpoint, I guess is what I'm trying to say.

D

Speaking of focus, there is a great focus on learning new things. So when you don't know something, you sort of feel that enforcement that you're able to either collaborate within your support, global group or you might even be able to go outside the global group. Because that'd be great, you know you can still collaborate as usual.

D

um So if something comes in say because there's round robin comes into your group, but you want to uh you're not sure what the answer is definitely feel like you can collaborate either within the group or without, and um you can try and learn something new in the process and uh also, as this already mentioned, reducing worry about taking time off so because you're in a smaller team.

D

It's a lot easier to find coverage for your tickets and um you're also able to help out other team members when they need to take some time off as well, which is which is really handy.

D

So definitely if you haven't already make sure that you check out the frequently asked questions that we have for the sport global groups check out the handbook pages. If there's any pages specifically for your group, the team members may have already created definitely a good, read and make sure to reach out to us in the slack groups. If you see any of the um the support global group, slack groups um definitely reach out to us or if you just want to reach out to people individually, just ask their feedback or get their questions.

D

It's definitely the right idea.