Proposal: Temporarily Unregionalize ZenDesk Views

Context and Evidence

Ideas for changes to improve SLA was collected in:

One possible proposal is the one you're reading.

Stats show that:

  1. Assignment/Resolution of tickets by other regions used to be common
  2. Time of ticket breach is often during crossover hours

Problem Statement

  • What is the problem?

Low SLA attainment.

  • Why is this a problem?

Not meeting KPI.

Proposal

Temporarily go back to Global (non-regionalized) needs-org/FRT view.

Temporary means:

  • review every week initially (for 4 weeks)
  • then every month for 3 months (equivalent to 1 quarter)
  • have managers decide when to "pull the plug" and go back to regionalized FRT view.

Optionally: Do this for NRT as well. However, my recommendation is that we do this for FRT view first to see if it improves FRT attainment before doing any further view changes.

Note: A separate FRT view was proposed so that SEs would have 1 REGION FRT and 1 non-REGION FRT. However, that's more difficult to manage and context switching. At time of writing, an informal poll shows the team is a bit split on preference. The upside is that if this is temporary, then it can be turned on and off without touching existing views.

Ticket prioritization and assignment considerations

  1. Add internal notes to High priority not-your-region tickets.
  2. Respond and assign if Medium/Low priority not-your-region tickets.
  3. Handover as needed.
  4. Encourage cross-region pairing and have in-region-engineer assign on tickets during pairing.

Open questions to answer

  1. Do we need to further consider how engineers do handovers?
  2. Do we need to communicate with customers if a not-in-region engineer takes on the ticket?
  3. Additional idea: What about a daily cross-region crush session on everyone's calendar a little bit ahead of and into the breach hours? We could include guidance that at 5+, to consider splitting off into multiple rooms.

DRI

Cynthia will act as the DRI for this issue.

Required Resources

  1. Management approval. @lyle will take this to leadership
  2. Communications to team.
  3. Support Ops to make the change.

Potential Roadblocks/Things to consider

  1. This will "undo" what managers were previously trying to achieve. See https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/support/support-team-meta/-/issues/3746#note_682659420
  2. This will introduce more changes to views, which many SEs have provided negative feedback on.

Desired Outcome

  • What does success look like?

Higher FRT SLA attainment.

  • How do we measure success?

SLA graphs.

  • Where would future feedback go?

In this issue.

Related Issues/MRs/Epics/Tickets

Edited by Cynthia "Arty" Ng