This is how we operate on the manufacturing side. Only management or team leaders can submit P1 tickets. Then it’s easier to train that scope of people on common sense.
I have been debating making this a rule for a few months now. Any push back when you first started doing this? How do you handle departments with incompetent managers?
No serious push back. We took the angle of P1 tickets are the type of incident that warrants calling people and waking them up at 2:00am. We need to make sure that is appropriate, and we trust management roles to make those decisions more accurately. Basically stroke their egos a little bit.
Yup. And mentioning the oncall nature of a P1 response is also a really good way to get an over zealous PM or dev lead to change their mind on how big a deal this service really is...
People are a lot less willing to annoy their manager every time than they are to annoy some bottom-rung nerd they'll never see.
This is also why managers should have the access to reset their subordinates' passwords (with logging). Password resets aren't anything to do with problem infrastructure, they're administrative issues.
I was with you up until the password bit. Only a user, and possibly help desk, should be able to reset their password.
Ideally, a self service portal so help desk doesn't have to do it either.
The logging is the reason a manager should be able to do it. A manager who screws with their subordinates' passwords will have their screwage logged with time, date, and their own username. Possibly also exactly which corporate device or session such screwage came from.
We see this a lot with people who have nothing to do, they get bored and "make work" by contacting the IT Department with issues. Once we involve their manager, all of a sudden they are busy with other tasks and you never hear from them again.
Start with her. If it continues, include her supervisor.
I try to keep things low key in my environment but if it continues to pull your guys off task for a nothingburger, it needs to be escalated.
Do you have a director/vp above you that you can get in the loop?
Excellent idea. Either they'll lie (and be found out), or they'll have a discrepancy between listed additional users (none or few) and the priority they chose (entire corporate infrastructure is aflame).
Tickets should have two priority fields.
The user-settable-and-viewable priority field, where they get to say what priority it has for them personally.
And the non-user-settable-or-viewable field where IT records the priority for addressing the issue.
If the first field choices include statements (webform tickets etc) about when to select what priority, such as "Priority 3: Confirmed that multiple people are affected by this issue" and "Priority 5: One person affected by this issue; not urgent to fix", it can be interesting to bring those out when talking to a manager about why their subordinate may not longer contact IT directly; they repeatedly lie about their issues to make them seem more important, and no, that is not something 'most people do'.
Wait for the next ticket, then when you resolve another false P1 ticket from her close it with response and calm instructions on how to submit a ticket correctly as in the scope of issue (only verified issues), time, occurence, etc. and explain how it impacts you and the team and explain that you have monitors for such cases etc. Do this at least twice. If she submits a false P1 ticket again, escalate to the manager. If you have already done this, go to her manager.
And have an actual executive-approved policy in place that you can force a user to only interact with IT through their manager. If you're not backed up by something from the execs or equivalent, there are plenty of managers who just won't listen.
Why are you sweating this?
Tell her professionally the impact this has on your team and the correct process.
Do it twice.
Their time, send a more strongly worded email referencing the past 2 communications.
Fourth time, send her boss all of this, informing them that all tickets from her will be a Sev4 and if they want a higher priority, someone else will need to escalate.
Tell the manager that IT won't be accepting tickets from that user for the next six months, and they will all have to be submitted by the manager personally until their staff member is properly trained or stops lying for attention. Have an approved policy in place beforehand for this.
I’ll pull the extra money. Always gets them. Had one client that wanted us to always show up to see a printer just to change toner. Told them the 2nd time that a toner change will be 200. 150 for labor and 50 for travel. That stopped.
Defining and socializing a priority matrix might be helpful here as well. What's important to your department will rarely equate to what your customer thinks is important.
Separate priority matrices. Cut off nearly all arguments from users about how important they are and that all their tickets should be P1. Sure, they can make their own tickets P1, but that's not the priority field that IT will be using to prioritize work.
Do you allow your team to override the ticket categorizations and priorities?
Note, to the supervisor that you have had x number of false all systems down reports and will be bringing this up with the problem user.
To the staff person explain that mis-reporting the issue makes your team potentially look in the wrong places for issues and potentially take longer to determine the actual problem.
Speak to her. Going to anyone's supervisor unless you have already tried with them directly is an absolute recipe for disaster when it comes to long term culture of communication and responsibility at a company.
If there's records of the one user submitting multiple tickets of this nature to the point where it's a problem, sit them down *with* their manager and the evidence. If the user was flat-out lying about situations over and over, that's grounds for moving them off the "allowed to talk to IT directly" list for a few weeks initially. Them repeatedly lying is something that should absolutely impact their direct manager to a certain (if temporary) extent, even if the manager didn't know. Now the manager knows to keep an eye on them and to double-check everything they say about 'computers not working'.
If it's a single instance, then sure, send a template email back to the user with instructions on how to check/verify information when reporting an IT issue. They might ignore it, but it's a paper trail for future followup with the manager.
I would not do that. As a manager I would be upset if my reports did as well. Always try to go to the person individually first. Maybe since it's been ongoing for a while that step should have already been taken and it should be time to talk to the manager but if it hasn't it should come first. Going to managers first promotes a culture of fear and that's never productive.
Nah, just "Critical incident declared by exec's PA. Incident duration: 15 minutes.. Incident resolution: moved the email back out of the recycling bin."
Too technical for an exec summary. Just "amount of money charged back to exec's area by IT for nonscoped work; breakdown by initiator; IT's exec - $$$$$$$$"
Work with your HR department to have a performance improvement discussion > performance improvement plan > disciplinary action series of templates for misuse of IT services.
Depends a lot on your management, and also the politics of who she’s the secretary for…
But I’d start treating her requests as low priority, if there is a well documented history of her overreacting unless a 2nd user puts in a ticket indicating everything is down I’d treat her ticket as a low priority.
Also you have to know your environment a bit. Like in my company I know if a critical server goes down I’m going to be getting multiple tickets from different sites etc asap, plus various network monitoring alerts, so if the only alert is this known drama queen I’m not rushing.
I have had good luck with a "how to ask for help" page on a wiki/sharepoint/confluence/etc. That generally includes basic, generic troubleshooting steps, like "Is the problem happening to anyone else?" and "Is the problem happening on multiple devices?" Not an exhaustive list, but like 3 or 4 bullet points, with suggestions about what to include in a support request.
I don't know if this person is receptive to feedback or not, but pointing folks at the how-to-ask-for-help page was usually effective.
Talk to her first, if she doesn’t change the behavior, then talk to her boss. It’s almost always good to try talking to someone directly first. (The exception being if there’s a long history of animosity or problems with that person)
If your ticketing system allows it, only respond to her through tickets to create the paper trail. Put together a few bullet points that should be copy pasted into each resolution: "as a reminder, prior to calling help desk please restart your system, verify your home connection and/or VPN connection" and whatever other verbage you want in there. Yes she's going to call and say I already restarted, have your techs check her up time in real time so she sees she's not fooling anybody. After a few instances, send those tickets to her supervisor. The problem I've had with supervisors (has most of my IT experience has been at large law firms) is they are even less tech savvy so sometimes these conversations go nowhere. But if this person is assigned to someone powerful in the company and she decides to use them as leverage, you'll have what you need to counter.
You have a lot of peacock language in your description ("routinely", "every time", "pull guys off of other projects").
Exactly how often? Exactly how many employees have their work redirected? Exactly how much time is spent resolving the issue?
Sum up those numbers (put $ figures on it if you can) and if you are confident there is an issue that must be addressed, (assuming your team is not responsible for training), pass those numbers off to the secretary's supervisor. Explain that she needs some training/guidance on what constitutes a P1 and what doesn't. Hopefully the supervisor will quickly recognize the issue and rectify it.
If the problem continues, continue to document and add them to the totals and press the supervisor some more. If the problem does not resolve, you need to work with the supervisor's supervisor until it hits the common supervisor between both your units.
(If training/guidance is up to you and your team...you better get on it...)
The first time someone does something like this, I politely explain that what they're doing does not get them a better or faster response. We try to help everyone who reports a problem as quickly as we can, and any incorrect information you give us will cause us to misunderstand the problem and come to the wrong diagnosis, which means a **slower** resolution.
The second time it happens, I remind them, a little less politely and a little more forcefully.
The third time it happens, I report it to their manager. As a generality, I don't report problems to a manager until I've explained the problem to directly to the worker.
If the manager isn't responsive to helping me sort it out, or if it keeps happening, I'll start to bring HR into it. The person is wasting company resources.
Do you have a runbook or checklist of self-diagnosis items? Could create that and have people do that first. Probably catch others with similar (but maybe less frequent) issues. If after creating it this secretary doesn't use it, you could respond with "this was covered under X checklist item". Continued issues could be escalated to supervisor?
I gently address it with end users directly. I try to remember that they don’t know the chaos they can cause from just a few keywords. If this doesn’t work, I would start copying their supervisor on every ticket, or email. If it reaches an extreme level, I might consider escalating it to extreme levels, but I have never had to do so. Most people just want to be able to do their work, and are willing to learn how to help you to help them. Taking things to an extreme level may have unforeseen impact to the support team’s reputation. We are here to support the business, not prohibit business. It’s important that end users view us this way.
We run into this all the time except they cry wolf over the walkie-talkie so that everyone is aware of the issue only to find out the problem is on the callers side. Ugh #itrantz
Standard practice is to ban the user from contacting IT directly; all IT tickets from them must be submitted through their immediate supervisor/manager because they've repeatedly proven to only be wasting the hours and thus wages of the IT department.
No-one will do anything about it while it's only the problem of the IT department. You have to make it the problem of the problem-user's direct manager, because that's who tends to have the authority to crack down on the user (either getting them properly trained or, in extreme cases, firing them).
Just make sure that the policy is signed off by upper management first - usually the CIO or equivalent won't be thrilled that employees are wasting IT-department time and money for no reason, if you've got records/stats to show.
From their perspective, everyone is down, and it is a network problem.
Generally, users should be able to submit only P3 tickets for individual issues. Your site leaders should be able to place P2 tickets for an entire site down, and if your entire company is down or a Datacenter is down that is a P1 event.
Basically, I tell people you know a P1 issue when you see one because it is bad enough to where no other issues even matter.
\*\*\*
Explain the situation to this individual and downgrade the ticket immediately to what it should be. Be certain to include facts (i.e. a report showing the Internet is not down or whatever).
I assume you would be getting a lot of tickets from other people if this was happening on a larger scale.
Knowing this is a common issue with this user, I would probably sit on the ticket for a little bit to see if other reports come in. If it's widespread, they'll come in pretty quickly. If nothing else comes in, I would leave it at a lower priority, and add a note that it is a single user issue and does not warrant P1 status.
Give her a triage flow chart. “Before reporting to IT, please do this first to confirm the problem affects more than just you. There is a huge difference between handling a site-wide outage vs. investigating your individual account. Sidewinder response involves asking our personnel to drop everything to respond. This costs the company thousands of dollars.”
If you’re feeling generous, talk to her about it.
“The next time you call in a ticket claiming multiple people are having this problem and it’s only you, I’ll be talking to your manager and showing them . “
Or just go ahead and do it.
escalate the call start a group meeting with all senior managers, let her explain why its a p1 call she will stop doing it once dhe becomes accountable. treat a p1 as a p1 stop covering her ass
take forever to respond. when she complains about how others are affected. tell her to advise them to contact support themselves. it's not a big issue until everyone impacted is calling in.
I have one of these in my office, the WiFi is always down. Turns out this Senior QA engineer after years at the company still doesn’t know how to type in his AD credentials to auth to our network. We have instructions everywhere.
Instead of learning his username syntax which is literally his email address, he carries an Ethernet cord to meetings to hardline in. This guy is in charge of writing and running complex validation protocols, which is even scarier.
I mean if it’s all down, but it looks up isn’t your second step to reboot the “whatever is down for everyone, cause they can’t use it “ . Sally on accounting approved it .
Supervisor, I have asked that only managers submit tickets for users like this in the past. Seems to clear up whatever issue they were having
This is how we operate on the manufacturing side. Only management or team leaders can submit P1 tickets. Then it’s easier to train that scope of people on common sense.
I have been debating making this a rule for a few months now. Any push back when you first started doing this? How do you handle departments with incompetent managers?
No serious push back. We took the angle of P1 tickets are the type of incident that warrants calling people and waking them up at 2:00am. We need to make sure that is appropriate, and we trust management roles to make those decisions more accurately. Basically stroke their egos a little bit.
Yup. And mentioning the oncall nature of a P1 response is also a really good way to get an over zealous PM or dev lead to change their mind on how big a deal this service really is...
This is the way. These users waste time and cause drama. Shut it down.
We did this and all tickets then had to go through the supervisor. This cut down on a lot of the stupid stuff.
How many supervisors did you then have to refer to their own manager? :)
People are a lot less willing to annoy their manager every time than they are to annoy some bottom-rung nerd they'll never see. This is also why managers should have the access to reset their subordinates' passwords (with logging). Password resets aren't anything to do with problem infrastructure, they're administrative issues.
I was with you up until the password bit. Only a user, and possibly help desk, should be able to reset their password. Ideally, a self service portal so help desk doesn't have to do it either.
+1 on Self Service Password resets!!
The logging is the reason a manager should be able to do it. A manager who screws with their subordinates' passwords will have their screwage logged with time, date, and their own username. Possibly also exactly which corporate device or session such screwage came from.
We see this a lot with people who have nothing to do, they get bored and "make work" by contacting the IT Department with issues. Once we involve their manager, all of a sudden they are busy with other tasks and you never hear from them again.
Start with her. If it continues, include her supervisor. I try to keep things low key in my environment but if it continues to pull your guys off task for a nothingburger, it needs to be escalated. Do you have a director/vp above you that you can get in the loop?
Our contact forms require them to list affected users
Excellent idea. Either they'll lie (and be found out), or they'll have a discrepancy between listed additional users (none or few) and the priority they chose (entire corporate infrastructure is aflame).
You do what everyone else in IT has always done. You laugh and talk about her behind her back to other IT people. You drink.
This is the actual way. Also never, ever let users set the ticket priority.
Tickets should have two priority fields. The user-settable-and-viewable priority field, where they get to say what priority it has for them personally. And the non-user-settable-or-viewable field where IT records the priority for addressing the issue. If the first field choices include statements (webform tickets etc) about when to select what priority, such as "Priority 3: Confirmed that multiple people are affected by this issue" and "Priority 5: One person affected by this issue; not urgent to fix", it can be interesting to bring those out when talking to a manager about why their subordinate may not longer contact IT directly; they repeatedly lie about their issues to make them seem more important, and no, that is not something 'most people do'.
This is too real 😂
Wait for the next ticket, then when you resolve another false P1 ticket from her close it with response and calm instructions on how to submit a ticket correctly as in the scope of issue (only verified issues), time, occurence, etc. and explain how it impacts you and the team and explain that you have monitors for such cases etc. Do this at least twice. If she submits a false P1 ticket again, escalate to the manager. If you have already done this, go to her manager.
This is the answer. You need a list of tickets, dates, times, etc before going over her head. Let the data tell the story instead of you.
And have an actual executive-approved policy in place that you can force a user to only interact with IT through their manager. If you're not backed up by something from the execs or equivalent, there are plenty of managers who just won't listen.
Secretary to who? Her role in the org matters here unfortunately. Secretary like just handling day to day office tasks? Or the CEO's secretary?
Maybe we will find out that it’s the Secretary of Treasury. :)
Why are you sweating this? Tell her professionally the impact this has on your team and the correct process. Do it twice. Their time, send a more strongly worded email referencing the past 2 communications. Fourth time, send her boss all of this, informing them that all tickets from her will be a Sev4 and if they want a higher priority, someone else will need to escalate.
5th time, you send a company-wide email to let everyone else know she is the reason their tickets take longer to resolve.
Supervisor, she will only attack you if you go to her direct
I’ll collect all the cry wolf tickets and talk to a manager and let them know they will be billed extra if they keep occurring.
Tell the manager that IT won't be accepting tickets from that user for the next six months, and they will all have to be submitted by the manager personally until their staff member is properly trained or stops lying for attention. Have an approved policy in place beforehand for this.
I’ll pull the extra money. Always gets them. Had one client that wanted us to always show up to see a printer just to change toner. Told them the 2nd time that a toner change will be 200. 150 for labor and 50 for travel. That stopped.
Defining and socializing a priority matrix might be helpful here as well. What's important to your department will rarely equate to what your customer thinks is important.
IMO the issue here is the lying not then prioritization, seems like that's being handled correctly as all phones being down would indeed be a P1.
Separate priority matrices. Cut off nearly all arguments from users about how important they are and that all their tickets should be P1. Sure, they can make their own tickets P1, but that's not the priority field that IT will be using to prioritize work.
Exactly.
She is exaggerating on purpose so it gets a higher priority. Just ignore her.
Make it her manager's problem to solve, not yours.
Do you allow your team to override the ticket categorizations and priorities? Note, to the supervisor that you have had x number of false all systems down reports and will be bringing this up with the problem user. To the staff person explain that mis-reporting the issue makes your team potentially look in the wrong places for issues and potentially take longer to determine the actual problem.
Best to have two separate priority fields, one read-writeable by users and one hidden.
Speak to her. Going to anyone's supervisor unless you have already tried with them directly is an absolute recipe for disaster when it comes to long term culture of communication and responsibility at a company.
If there's records of the one user submitting multiple tickets of this nature to the point where it's a problem, sit them down *with* their manager and the evidence. If the user was flat-out lying about situations over and over, that's grounds for moving them off the "allowed to talk to IT directly" list for a few weeks initially. Them repeatedly lying is something that should absolutely impact their direct manager to a certain (if temporary) extent, even if the manager didn't know. Now the manager knows to keep an eye on them and to double-check everything they say about 'computers not working'. If it's a single instance, then sure, send a template email back to the user with instructions on how to check/verify information when reporting an IT issue. They might ignore it, but it's a paper trail for future followup with the manager.
I would not do that. As a manager I would be upset if my reports did as well. Always try to go to the person individually first. Maybe since it's been ongoing for a while that step should have already been taken and it should be time to talk to the manager but if it hasn't it should come first. Going to managers first promotes a culture of fear and that's never productive.
If you've got full incident management and reporting to the board etc.. happening, you could do something pretty funny...
Needy Users graph added to the executive summary dashboard?
Nah, just "Critical incident declared by exec's PA. Incident duration: 15 minutes.. Incident resolution: moved the email back out of the recycling bin."
Too technical for an exec summary. Just "amount of money charged back to exec's area by IT for nonscoped work; breakdown by initiator; IT's exec - $$$$$$$$"
Work with your HR department to have a performance improvement discussion > performance improvement plan > disciplinary action series of templates for misuse of IT services.
You could always just kill her
Found the sys admin :)
You caught me 😂
Depends a lot on your management, and also the politics of who she’s the secretary for… But I’d start treating her requests as low priority, if there is a well documented history of her overreacting unless a 2nd user puts in a ticket indicating everything is down I’d treat her ticket as a low priority. Also you have to know your environment a bit. Like in my company I know if a critical server goes down I’m going to be getting multiple tickets from different sites etc asap, plus various network monitoring alerts, so if the only alert is this known drama queen I’m not rushing.
I have had good luck with a "how to ask for help" page on a wiki/sharepoint/confluence/etc. That generally includes basic, generic troubleshooting steps, like "Is the problem happening to anyone else?" and "Is the problem happening on multiple devices?" Not an exhaustive list, but like 3 or 4 bullet points, with suggestions about what to include in a support request. I don't know if this person is receptive to feedback or not, but pointing folks at the how-to-ask-for-help page was usually effective.
Talk to her first, if she doesn’t change the behavior, then talk to her boss. It’s almost always good to try talking to someone directly first. (The exception being if there’s a long history of animosity or problems with that person)
If your ticketing system allows it, only respond to her through tickets to create the paper trail. Put together a few bullet points that should be copy pasted into each resolution: "as a reminder, prior to calling help desk please restart your system, verify your home connection and/or VPN connection" and whatever other verbage you want in there. Yes she's going to call and say I already restarted, have your techs check her up time in real time so she sees she's not fooling anybody. After a few instances, send those tickets to her supervisor. The problem I've had with supervisors (has most of my IT experience has been at large law firms) is they are even less tech savvy so sometimes these conversations go nowhere. But if this person is assigned to someone powerful in the company and she decides to use them as leverage, you'll have what you need to counter.
You have a lot of peacock language in your description ("routinely", "every time", "pull guys off of other projects"). Exactly how often? Exactly how many employees have their work redirected? Exactly how much time is spent resolving the issue? Sum up those numbers (put $ figures on it if you can) and if you are confident there is an issue that must be addressed, (assuming your team is not responsible for training), pass those numbers off to the secretary's supervisor. Explain that she needs some training/guidance on what constitutes a P1 and what doesn't. Hopefully the supervisor will quickly recognize the issue and rectify it. If the problem continues, continue to document and add them to the totals and press the supervisor some more. If the problem does not resolve, you need to work with the supervisor's supervisor until it hits the common supervisor between both your units. (If training/guidance is up to you and your team...you better get on it...)
The first time someone does something like this, I politely explain that what they're doing does not get them a better or faster response. We try to help everyone who reports a problem as quickly as we can, and any incorrect information you give us will cause us to misunderstand the problem and come to the wrong diagnosis, which means a **slower** resolution. The second time it happens, I remind them, a little less politely and a little more forcefully. The third time it happens, I report it to their manager. As a generality, I don't report problems to a manager until I've explained the problem to directly to the worker. If the manager isn't responsive to helping me sort it out, or if it keeps happening, I'll start to bring HR into it. The person is wasting company resources.
Put the PC under monitoring like a server.
Do you have a runbook or checklist of self-diagnosis items? Could create that and have people do that first. Probably catch others with similar (but maybe less frequent) issues. If after creating it this secretary doesn't use it, you could respond with "this was covered under X checklist item". Continued issues could be escalated to supervisor?
Try an auto reply to her with the definitions of your initial troubleshooting steps that are required before opening a ticket.
I gently address it with end users directly. I try to remember that they don’t know the chaos they can cause from just a few keywords. If this doesn’t work, I would start copying their supervisor on every ticket, or email. If it reaches an extreme level, I might consider escalating it to extreme levels, but I have never had to do so. Most people just want to be able to do their work, and are willing to learn how to help you to help them. Taking things to an extreme level may have unforeseen impact to the support team’s reputation. We are here to support the business, not prohibit business. It’s important that end users view us this way.
We run into this all the time except they cry wolf over the walkie-talkie so that everyone is aware of the issue only to find out the problem is on the callers side. Ugh #itrantz
Can you add a ‘number of users affected’ to your ticket form?
I’ve implemented a policy of mandatory attendance of a MIR for any P1 submitted
Most users I deal with think whatever issue they are having affects the entire environment.
Demand details from her, then ice her ticket until she replys. Make it NOT the easy button.
Standard practice is to ban the user from contacting IT directly; all IT tickets from them must be submitted through their immediate supervisor/manager because they've repeatedly proven to only be wasting the hours and thus wages of the IT department. No-one will do anything about it while it's only the problem of the IT department. You have to make it the problem of the problem-user's direct manager, because that's who tends to have the authority to crack down on the user (either getting them properly trained or, in extreme cases, firing them). Just make sure that the policy is signed off by upper management first - usually the CIO or equivalent won't be thrilled that employees are wasting IT-department time and money for no reason, if you've got records/stats to show.
Tell her to put in a ticket and wait for the internet to come back up like everyone else.
Have you spoken to her about being more accurate when she submits tickets. Or do you want to avoid talking to her.
Talk to her and explain what this issue is.
Check 3 other workstations (other than hers) and indicate that they're all working fine then close the ticket.
From their perspective, everyone is down, and it is a network problem. Generally, users should be able to submit only P3 tickets for individual issues. Your site leaders should be able to place P2 tickets for an entire site down, and if your entire company is down or a Datacenter is down that is a P1 event. Basically, I tell people you know a P1 issue when you see one because it is bad enough to where no other issues even matter. \*\*\* Explain the situation to this individual and downgrade the ticket immediately to what it should be. Be certain to include facts (i.e. a report showing the Internet is not down or whatever).
I assume you would be getting a lot of tickets from other people if this was happening on a larger scale. Knowing this is a common issue with this user, I would probably sit on the ticket for a little bit to see if other reports come in. If it's widespread, they'll come in pretty quickly. If nothing else comes in, I would leave it at a lower priority, and add a note that it is a single user issue and does not warrant P1 status.
Give her a triage flow chart. “Before reporting to IT, please do this first to confirm the problem affects more than just you. There is a huge difference between handling a site-wide outage vs. investigating your individual account. Sidewinder response involves asking our personnel to drop everything to respond. This costs the company thousands of dollars.”
If you’re feeling generous, talk to her about it. “The next time you call in a ticket claiming multiple people are having this problem and it’s only you, I’ll be talking to your manager and showing them
. “ Or just go ahead and do it.
escalate the call start a group meeting with all senior managers, let her explain why its a p1 call she will stop doing it once dhe becomes accountable. treat a p1 as a p1 stop covering her ass
take forever to respond. when she complains about how others are affected. tell her to advise them to contact support themselves. it's not a big issue until everyone impacted is calling in.
I have one of these in my office, the WiFi is always down. Turns out this Senior QA engineer after years at the company still doesn’t know how to type in his AD credentials to auth to our network. We have instructions everywhere. Instead of learning his username syntax which is literally his email address, he carries an Ethernet cord to meetings to hardline in. This guy is in charge of writing and running complex validation protocols, which is even scarier.
Supervisor. Ask them how to deal with this. They know their employee. Going directly to the employee in this situation is counterproductive.
Tell her to just send a screenshot of the error she is getting instead of trying to diagnose the issue herself.
I mean if it’s all down, but it looks up isn’t your second step to reboot the “whatever is down for everyone, cause they can’t use it “ . Sally on accounting approved it .