Executive Insight: For Level 3, It’s All About Focus
David Duncan, IDX Systems Corp.

David Duncan is the support technologies manager for IDX Systems Corp., a provider of software, services, and technologies for healthcare providers. Before becoming the support technologies manager, Duncan was technical support manager with responsibility over 32 support engineers. He now manages 15 engineers responsible for delivering Level 3 support, authoring knowledge, and product/technology engineering.

SSPA: Where did you acquire your management skills and experience?
Duncan: Before IDX, I was an Army officer. That’s where I got most of my management training.

SSPA: How did your military background prepare you - or not prepare you - for your current position?
Duncan: There’s a fundamental difference in management styles. The biggest difference is in the military, personnel sign a contract and you can pretty much tell them what to do. In the civilian world, you can be a lot more successful if you treat employees as contractors – as if they’re self-employed and have personal goals and agendas to meet. Then you can try to align those goals with what you want or need to get done in the organization.

One thing both environments have in common is that you want to make sure that people that report to you know that you work for them more than they work for you.

SSPA: What experiences prepared you most to be a support manager?
Duncan: One thing that prepared me for management is that as a junior officer, you’re put into a unit that you don’t know much about. That experience helped me develop the skills to be able to go into a completely foreign environment and quickly figure out who the best advisors are and how to find out what’s going on to make the right decisions. It also forces the delegation of decisions, as well as trust and reliance on others. If you know too much, there’s a tendency to micro-manage.

Ideally you want to know enough to intuitively know how decisions affect your group. Having the skills and understanding to find that middle tier of information detail is important.

In the civilian world, oftentimes an individual contributor is promoted into a leadership role in the same organization, which has its own challenges.

SSPA: I understand you’re managed as a profit center. What’s the biggest difference in being managed as a profit center as opposed to a cost center?
Duncan: We seem to get things done a lot faster – if we need resources and we can show how we can pull more than a 20% return on investment, it’s much easier to get those resources.

SSPA: How do you define support levels within IDX? What are the differences in managing Level 2 support vs. Level 3 support?
Duncan: For IDX, Level 1 support is functional support, Level 2 is engineering support, and Level 3 is the development group within support. We have complex support so Level 1 is expected to resolve 25% of issues, Level 2 resolves 72%, and Level 3 resolves 3% of customer issues and also manages product launch issues.

What made Level 2 easier was that everyone had roughly the same job description – they resolved customer issues. You can train them the same, call escalation issues were similar, performance metrics were similar, and so on. The important thing there was to establish proper support triage – to find a consistent way to prioritize the work. This is becoming even more important as customer expectations become heightened.

No matter what the issues are, or how well you’re staffed, customers will want you to do more and you need a consistent way to determine what you’re going to do and how to gracefully say “no” to some service requests. It’s also important to do the triage quickly so you don’t pay interest on the backlog.

In Level 3, the important word is focus. There are a lot of items running in parallel for Level 3 and we have many small groups. It’s difficult to keep track of each group but most groups have well-defined goals and we typically have higher levels of independent contributors at this level. As long as the proper focus is applied, there’s less noise though it is more complex.

SSPA: As a manager of Level 3, your customers are Level 1 and 2 support reps. Is it easier to manage their expectations or easier to manage customers?
Duncan: It’s easier to support Level 1 and 2 support reps because we live in the same world. And they’re right here in front of us all day.

SSPA: As you have opportunities for people to advance from level 2 to level 3, what attributes or characteristics do you look for in candidates?
Duncan: We look for a combination of strong technical expertise, the ability to manage projects, and business sense. We’re managed as a profit center but Level 3 is entirely overhead so whatever we do, we have to justify in benefits. Most of the assignments are larger in scope so having people with project management experience helps us all gain the focus we need.

SSPA: What other management techniques or hiring techniques do you use?
Duncan: I make it a point to hire people that aren’t necessarily alike. We all get along very well professionally, and most were hired internally, but they aren’t all likely to go out and have a beer together after work. They all come from different walks of life and have different perspectives. That seems to help the crew a lot. I’m a rugby player and we set a rule that what happens on the field, stays on the field. That plays well with this diverse group.

We also strive for a balance between high flyers and medium flyers. We have some people who like what they’re doing and have a lot of knowledge and can mentor others. Then we have those that are on their way up the ladder, who do a great job and then move on. They bring us forward while they’re with us and provide good work. If I had all high flyers, I’m not sure how far we’d get so we need that balance with people to provide some stability and maintain the knowledge.