[APAC] OKR FY24 Q1 - Buddy Up Across regions to put the global back into Support Global Groups
This OKR supports our "Strengthen the Team" strategic objective
Objective: Buddy Up Across regions to put the global back into Support Global Groups
Key Results:
- KR1: 2 x SGGs have all APAC 6 month+ tenured support engineers adopt an interregional ticket buddy within their SGG.
- KR2: 100% of APAC ticket buddies contribute 20 internal comments on their buddy's tickets.
- KR3: Achieve 5.5 (out of 7) average sentiment on ease of ticket handover in APAC for the participating SEs
Some principles being applied for this work
- Keep the expected effort for non-APAC regions as minimal as feasible where-ever possible
- What we learn from this will have as much value as what we achieve - frequent feedback is welcomed (this also enables iteration)
What's the thinking behind this?
APAC Support managers have worked together on ideating this activity. Here's my depiction of what we've been thinking and considering as we finalised the key results of this objective, and the activities that support achieving those key results.
Achieving this OKR supports one of our desired outcomes of "Strengthen the team: Team members are comfortable belonging to both Support Team APAC and Support Global Groups, and it is clear how both complement each other in how we work." If this is successful, we will look to adopt this practice of having interregional ticket buddies as part of how we work in APAC. We'll iterate as we learn.
SGG Connections
Most groups, in most regions, have developed a way of communicating together and working together and have formed connection to varying depths with their regional SGG peers. Some attempts have been made, with varying success, to expand those connections to other regions, but for the most part, SGGs are still largely confined to working well within region and not so much inter-regionally.
Speaking just for APAC, we want to stretch a little and see if we can lean in to async approaches to start forming more connection with peers in other regions. The intent is to keep this focused on the work we do together, rather than heading in to the sometimes uncomfortable realm of learning more about each other personally like we've done in our coffee chat and movie quote adventures, where we sought to learn something about a person's preferences or opinions.
The plan is that 2 of our 5 SGGs will be randomly selected, and the APAC group members who have been at GitLab for more than 6 months will be randomly "buddied up" with a peer in their SGG in either EMEA or AMER. APAC buddies will drop by the assigned tickets of their inter-regional peer every so often, may set up an async pairing session and related pairing issue to work together on tickets, or to learn from tickets (we thought about using Internal Comments on tickets, but the group members pointed out this adds a lot of noise to tickets, so decided aysnc pairing sessions in #spt_pairing could be a good option to try).
Further to that, we'll seek to build on the connections that have hopefully started to form by considering how we might find an easier path to interregional ticket handovers - not by asking your buddy to take the ticket, but rather by first working within region with whoever has a buddy in the target region (you may need to handover a ticket to AMER while your ticket buddy is in EMEA), and then them asking the buddy in the target region if they could help represent the need for the ticket handover within their working hours with their group.
The thinking behind this is that is with connection that we tend to work better together - it helps us build trust, it gives us more psychological safety, it helps us develop a greater sense of being a group.
Ticket handovers between regions
A specific piece of feedback managers often hear in 1-1s and other forums in APAC (and we're guessing in other regions too) is that ticket handover to other regions when a ticket needs an assignee aligned with the customer's region is hard to do and requires a lot of effort and often a lot of delay for the customer. This is also observable if you reflect on requests in slack for these handovers. This was chosen as an area to observe and measure to see if the activity in this OKR results in a measurable improvement in how easy these ticket handovers feel for APAC Support Engineers.
An important scope definition on ticket handover:
We have several scenarios that involve some sort of ticket handover between regions. To be very clear about this OKR work, we are talking about situations where:
You are the assignee of a ticket, and you need to find a new assignee in a different region. This could be for a variety of reasons - a need for more timezone alignment with the customer; a request from the customer (or GitLab CSM/Sales) to move it to another region.
Other scenarios are OUT OF SCOPE, such as an HPAR that needs round the clock NRT responses, tickets that you will continue to be the assignee on but where you need someone to lead a sync call with the customer in a different timezone.
TASKS
The effort to realise those results will be in 3 phases as follows:
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Starting state survey -
Choose 2 x APAC groups (randomly) - Ginkgo & Baobab. -
Communicate -
Cast the vision with the 2 APAC groups of participants (in issue, multi-modal share) -
Describe expectations on APAC and other regions (minimal to 0 for other regions - mostly awareness) -
Create feedback issue for full lifecycle of OKR-
Feedback can be shared in this issue, keep it all in one place.
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Ideate together and create guidelines of how to try connecting with Buddy’s for interregional ticket handover -
dependency: AMER SGG re-group. This needs to be concluded before pairing people up to avoid having to re-pair people) -
Video heads up FYI to global managers
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Let other region buddies know what to expect: how? -
Video intro -
allow time for opt-out -
do random pairing and let people know (31 March) -
Have APAC buddies introduce themselves.
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APAC buddies start connecting with their buddies.
CLOSING PHASE: Final feedback, measurements, learnings and recommendations
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Repeat starting state survey to APAC participants -
Compare starting and ending state data -
Seek unstructured feedback from global buddies -
Consider also providing a means to give unfiltered, anonymous feedback.
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Measure and score KR results -
List what we learned -
Make recommendations