Step-By-Stupid

I work at a company doing technical support. Our help desk is notorious for simply forwarding tickets to us without attempting basic troubleshooting. When the help desk gets a new manager, he decides to address the situation by asking us to provide a troubleshooting process for the help desk operators to follow. We respond with a step-by-step numbered list of troubleshooting measures.

However, what we notice is that we are STILL getting a heavy volume of calls escalated to us. Looking into it, we discover why. The help desk is doing step one of the troubleshooting, and then, when it fails, forwarding it on to us without trying the remaining steps. When we bring this to the manager’s attention:

Manager: “Look, these are just help-desk people. They don’t understand step-by-step processes, and after step one, you didn’t specify, ‘Go to step two.’ I mean, I’d naturally assume that, because I’m a manager, but you can’t expect them to!”

We just stared at him, but from then on, we had to specify in our procedures to move to the next step when finishing another. Apparently, if you’re not a manager, you’re not smart enough to realize how numbered steps work without it being spelled out for you.