Status Board: Inside Twin State Technical Services

We’ve been quietly overhauling almost every aspect of the way we receive, manage, and fix problems for our clients. Our status board is instrumental in helping us solve issues faster.

When one of our clients calls us with a problem, we want to solve it as quickly as possible. This, of course, is much easier when everyone at Twin State is on the same page. Where is everyone? Who is the best person to solve this issue? Are we allocating our resources as efficiently as possible? We built a status board ((We wrote our own solution before Panic released their app to the public. However, I use Panic’s app to keep track of my own projects. It’s great.)) to answer questions like these.

What’s a Status Board?

Our status board is a real-time visual display of data that helps us work smarter. Much like the panels you see on a car dashboard or in the cockpit of an airplane, our status board lets us know how fast we’re moving. It also tells us when something is wrong.

Client Servers

We offer remote monitoring to our clients, so we can track their servers and networks right here at Twin State. When something’s wrong, we’ll know right away because it’s projected on our 50” screen in the center of our office (plus an additional one near our server room). Having this information centralized and visible to everyone here means our clients don’t ahve to call us if their network goes down. We just start working to fix it right away.

We’ve even color coded the types of alerts we get so we can avoid an all hands on deck response when our laser printer is low on paper. Red alerts are ones that require an immediate response (like if there’s a problem with DNS) while yellow alerts warn us about preventative measures we may need to take (like if Windows Update hasn’t been run in a while).

Support Tickets

We track every phone call and email we get to make sure we don’t let anything slip through the cracks. Our projects and tasks are fed into a centralized system and put on display. That way, we know what needs work and who’s responsible for getting it done. This is our company-wide, public to do list, and it’s made us better.

In / Out Board

In addition to tracking projects, we make it a priority to know where everyone is during business hours. Because any of us may leave at a moment’s notice to solve an problem, we needed a system that would allow us to post a status update from wherever we are. Our programmers built a custom web app that allows us to check in quickly, so everyone knows who’s out, where they are, and when they’ll be back.

Getting Better All The Time

It’s great being surrounded by programmers who can take advantage of APIs and write custom apps to display additional information on our status board. So, our board is likely to change over time, even if it’s just an occasional design refresh. (When I started at Twin State, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man would periodically appear on the board if there was an issue.)

If you’re interested in learning more about how we use our status board to improve our response time, come drop by the office for a quick demo! We’d love to show you how it works.

 

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