Our estate is thirty nine locations: twenty two depots, two laboratories, a dozen small sales offices and a head office. Technical staff sit in exactly two of them. That was a deliberate decision taken in 2019, it saved a genuine amount of money, and I would take it again. What we never did was replace the one thing those regional posts provided that a central team cannot, which is a pair of hands in the room.
A switch failed in our largest depot on a Monday morning in February. Diagnosis took nine minutes and the remedy was to move four cables into a spare unit sitting in the same cabinet. The depot dispatches around eleven hundred orders a day and dispatched none until twenty to five in the afternoon.
None of the delay was technical. Our maintenance contract promises four hours, which turned out to measure an engineer's arrival rather than a working depot, and he arrived at twenty past one. The cabinet was locked and the key was held by a facilities manager on annual leave. When it was finally opened, the spare unit had never been configured, because configuring it had been somebody's task at a site with nobody technical at it.
There were people in that building all day. Nineteen of them. Not one had permission, instruction or a plausible reason to touch anything in that room, and nothing in our operating model acknowledged that this was now the normal condition of most of our estate.
What we put in place is unglamorous. Every site has a nominated contact, usually the supervisor, with a laminated card listing the six things they may be asked to do under instruction: photograph a panel, read a label aloud, power cycle a named device, move a cable between two ports we colour coded, check a socket, unlock the room. Comms rooms were photographed, labelled and put behind a key safe whose code the service desk holds. The four largest depots hold a configured spare. Every site has a mobile console we can reach when the circuit itself is the fault. The contract was rewritten to measure a working service.
Since April, four of eleven site incidents were resolved by a supervisor with a card in her hand, inside forty minutes.
Centralising support removes the salary at the site. It does not remove the physics.
– Serguey Shinder
