Tag Archive for technician

Karl_Palachuk | June 15, 2012
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SOP Friday: Technician Supplies — The "Scary Box"

Article By Karl Palachuk

No matter how small your business is, you will need to provide your techs with certain supplies. The nature of what you need to provide changes over time. But you should have an official list and make sure your techs have what they need. A $4 cable becomes a $60 cable if you have to pay your technician to drive back to the office and pick it up!

We provide technicans with a plastic Rubbermaid-type box to carry in their trunk. It keeps the materials safe and orderly. In addition, this makes it easy for the tech to take these materials out of the trunk as needed. We call this the “Scary box” because it gets disorderly pretty fast. When techs are stressed out or in a hurry, they tend to dig through the box and never get around to straightening it out.

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Stuart_R_Crawford | May 28, 2012
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PASSPORTAL Integrates Active Directory to Ease the Lives of MSP’s

News from my friends at PASSPORTAL.  Colin was my service manager when I had my own MSP in Calgary, Canada.  Great guy and this is a must have solution for IT firms.  Register today especially now that AD integration is here.

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Karl_Palachuk | May 25, 2012
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SOP Friday: Guide to A Service Call

There are three stages to any service call. A service call means that a technician goes to a client’s office to perform work, as opposed to connecting remotely to client systems. The three stages are pretty obvious: Before the visit, during the visit, and after the visit.

1. Preparation

1.1. Company Materials, Parts, and Tools. Each technician needs to have certain supplies and tools to be able to perform their daily work tasks. We’ll talk about the “Scary box” of supplies in a few weeks. For now, just know that you need to make sure that each technician has what is needed to be successful. The goal is to never be on site without

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Karl_Palachuk | May 18, 2012
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SOP Friday 2012 05 18 Technician Time Management Guidelines

This procedure covers the standard “routine” for a technician. Before you get into any details, please note one critically important thing: The point of all of this process is to

Avoid being Interrupt Drive.

By “interrupt driven” I simply mean that you allow yourself to be interrupted and therefore end up doing whatever interrupted you most recently. This is so important that I’ve addressed it in several books and many times in my blog. It’s a simple phrase and a very difficult concept to implement. Just like exercise, if you get out of the habit of non-interruption for a few days, it can take some work to get back on track.

We allow ourselves to be interrupted by the telephone. How often is the telephone call more important than what you were doing? 2% of the time? We allow Outlook to pop up and beg for our attention. Then we have to go back to work. We let instant messengers from three different channels pop up and grab our attention. We check Facebook, Twitter, and our cell phones non-stop as if the world might actually end and we’d miss it.

This process does not end interruptions. But it does provide a framework

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