Swarming Culture

Much like Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS), swarming seems to be an obvious choice for support organizations, and yet, much like KCS it can be pretty hard to implement and sustain. My experiences with various clients suggest that the main challenges are not that the process is particular complicated (it’s quite simple, really), not that the tools are lacking (although they are!), not that the KPIs are impossible to establish (there’s an art to it, but it’s not that hard): the main challenge is culture.

Collaboration is naturally suited to support since the range of incoming issues is vast and few team members can hope to know not only everything there is to know about your products, but also everything there is to know about every other product used in conjunction with your products. Implementing swarming, the systematic, organized application of collaboration to the resolution of support issues, is much more demanding than simply removing handoffs to senior support engineers, and it’s much more sophisticated than sending Slack requests to colleagues. With my clients who are using swarming successfully share three cultural elements:

There is a sense of ownership. If someone doesn’t know how to solve a problem, they don’t just pass it on (actually, most of the time, they are not allowed to pass it on!). They dig in and find a solution.
There is humility. It’s fine to ask for help and to be seen asking for help, even for senior engineers.
There is a desire to lift others. Senior engineers don’t seek glory by being heroes with customers: they help behind the scenes and they help the team get smarter over time.

So how do managers encourage a swarming culture?

They hire low-ego team members. A selfish engineer can wreck swarming for everyone.
They encourage asking for help through group case reviews, individual queue reviews, and quality checks. Case owners must find answers for customers, not create all the answers.
They make it easy to swarm. Tools are still quite imperfect so they invest in custom work to make it frictionless to ask for help and to provide help.
They reward the helpers. If all the rewards go to case closers, helping will suffer.

Has your team implemented swarming? Please tell us about your experience in the comments.

(Don’t miss the panel on collaborative swarming at the upcoming TSW conference with Vele Galoski, Marlene Summers, and me!)