Having worked as an EUC Engineering Manager for 10+ years, I’ve experienced my fair share of ups and downs in corporate IT. Looking back, sometimes the lessons were brazenly obvious, but when you’re immersed in a digital transformation project or troubleshooting that nebulous L3 ticket, it’s easy to miss the signal in the noise.
While I don’t regret anything in my career, I certainly would’ve welcomed the tips I’m about to share!
Take these points as free, unsolicited management advice, from someone who’s swung from every branch in the IT decision-making tree.
1) Don’t Impose Decisions That Aren’t Tech Decisions
We engineers are obsessed with order. We’re a command-based, logic-following bunch. And in many IT departments, SOPs still rule the roost, even if employee data challenges those very policies and recommendations.
EUC leaders must rewire their teams’ problem-solving skills by pulling in the employee perspective. For example, I’ve seen engineers assume that they’ve got to decide for users if they want light mode vs. dark mode. It might seem frivolous, but that’s a huge assumption to make about an employee. My advice is to triple check that you’re not imposing an opinion about something that is inherently subjective.
2) Digital Onboarding is an Ocean of Untapped Potential for EUC
Whether your new hire will work in the office, remotely, or in a hybrid role—EUC managers can play a massive role in shortening the learning curve, and decreasing the stress and anxiety that comes with starting a new job.
In some regions (like in Europe, for example), it can take several weeks before a new hire signs their contract and officially starts working for the company. And that’s exactly where IT can get in earlier by ‘dripping’ digital credentials and tech offerings that help reduce onboarding time.
A word of caution: be wary you don’t bombard people before their official start date. But you can, however, offer restricted access in Teams, for example, just to get that new hire familiar with key documents and directives.
In the past, my team would send new hires a simple set of UX questions before their start date. We’d ask questions like ‘what type of laptop do you prefer?’ or ‘what’s the ideal setup you’d like?’, just so our people could hit the ground running and feel engaged in their work.
3) You Can Scale Big Transformation Projects with a Simple Formula
I’ve been lucky enough to work on several successful transformation projects in my career. But if I step back and reflect, I think the throughline between all of them is that my team knew how to automate well-defined tickets and collect and study DEX data from employees.
Automations are necessary to improving metrics like MTTR and overall ticket volume. And much of the work today in L1/2 can be automated with the right approach. For example, if a user experiences two blue screens in less than 48 hours, you can set an automated response with platforms like Nexthink.
And likewise, if you have the capability to collect sentiment data and benchmark with a DEX index, you’ll be able to organize your users by poor and strong experiences, and then proactively intervene if there are any dips in performance.
Sentiment scores and indexing are incredibly valuable. Even if you have an initial spike in tickets after you establish an index score, I think it’s worth it. What you’re doing is essentially collecting unique feedback in context that you’ll be able to automate in the future or develop a custom intervention. Either way, it’s a slice of the story that you’d never know about if you operated solely based on hard metrics collected from the device, app, or network.
4) Human and Work Psychology Skills Matter
To me, EUC is about the intersection of humans and technology. So that means sometimes you need to not only think outside the box, you need to hire outside the box.
Here’s a simple example. There was one employee at my last job who needed a new laptop. Our team messaged him for weeks but he refused to turn it in. Finally, we learned he didn’t want to comply because he liked that his computer (better said: malfunctioning computer) could fit comfortably inside his vespa!
The point is this: never underestimate the fickle, wonderful, complex nature of people. I think every IT department should cross-train specialists on common DEX and work psychology skills. Because then, and only then, will you have an EUC team that can enact positive work changes and productivity benefits for your organization.