When | first took over as Application Manager at the Home Office, a very significant amount of “team-time” was being spent doing application or output support. Essentially, the team was fielding queries from operations in the form of emails, calls, or desk visits. This was obviously not ideal as the members of my team would have no idea when or how many of these queries they would receive throughout the week and as such found it difficult to budget their time and know how to prioritise their work.

This was also not an ideal situation for the operational colleagues who would have no sense of when their query would be responded to or whether their query was being given the care and attention, it required.
The setup as it was did not fit my definition of providing a quality service so I set about making changes.

Firstly, | created an FAQ page that answered the most common questions the team received. Then | established a ticketing system, a shared mailbox, and | created a rota so that the mailbox was manned at all times. Tickets raised were given a timeframe for a response so colleagues were not left guessing. And finally, all of these changes were communicated across the operation as a whole.

The end result was a happy user base who could get answers quicker and more reliably and an even happier team because total queries were reduced by 80% when users were able to search the FAQ for their query in the first instance.