Case Reviews
FT Works recently posted In praise of the support scrum. In it, she discusses:
the joys of the support scrum (or huddle, or case review, as I usually call it)
A case review is a regularly-scheduled, structured meeting between support engineers designed to share difficult cases and exchange troubleshooting suggestions.
Back when I was a Tech Support Engineer at The MathWorks (where I first started using Clarify), we used to have these meetings. I forget exactly what we called them, but they were a great way to have a roundtable of senior engineers assisting us junior guys with difficult cases (i.e. calculating the FFT of quaternions, dealing with endian conversions with floats on a VAX, etc.). Sometimes we were able to get answers, sometimes we handed off the cases to a senior engineer. I also liked them because I got to hear what other problems were being discussed, and it allowed me to learn new things, and not to be embarrassed because I didn’t know how to answer certain issues.
Of course, be careful of time waiting for a meeting – you may not want to just let a case sit because there isn’t a case review meeting scheduled for two more days. Depending on urgency and customer expectations, an answer may be needed sooner than your next scheduled case review.
But when it’s appropriate, case review meetings are a great tool to have as part of your support team workflows.
Do you use case reviews? How do they work for your team?
