Algeria AgencyIT consulting & support
The person everybody asks: the internal relay
In every business somebody who is not in IT absorbs half the problems. What the role costs them, what to give them, and its three limits.
The companion article is written from the support provider’s side: the reported fault is not the fault, the first ten minutes decide the rest, who is allowed to say yes. It assumes the call has been made.
Between the user and that call there is somebody. In every business of this size we know, a person who is not in IT receives the problems first and settles a good share of them.
They were never appointed, they are not paid for it, they appear on no org chart, and their contribution is visible only in their absence — the week they are on leave, everybody notices.
This page does not propose removing the role: it cannot be removed, it exists everywhere and it is useful. It proposes naming it, giving it three things, and setting it three limits.
The role exists, decided or not
You already know who it is. It is the person people turn to when the printer will not answer, and it is nearly always somebody whose job has nothing to do with it: the office manager, a salesperson, the accountant, a slightly curious technician.
They became that for a simple reason: they fixed something once, successfully, with a witness. The rest built itself over eighteen months.
What they absorb is real and considerable. The forgotten password, the file nobody can find, the spreadsheet that will not print as expected, the phone no longer receiving messages: all things that never become a call to the provider because they were settled in four minutes.
What that produces from the company’s point of view is excellent and invisible. Problems get solved fast, the support contract is not consumed, and nobody notices that somebody is doing this work.
What it produces from the person’s point of view is more ambiguous, and it is the next section’s subject: work that was never decided, is never counted, is added to their own, and that they cannot complain about since they started it voluntarily.
What the role costs the person holding it
That cost is worth looking at honestly, because it decides whether the person lasts two years or ends up refusing flatly on a Tuesday morning.
The first cost is fragmentation. Twelve four-minute interruptions a day do not cost forty-eight minutes: they cost a morning’s concentration, and the person absorbing them does their own work in the evening.
The second is the absence of recognition, which is more corrosive than people expect. This work does not appear in their appraisal, offsets no delay on their own tasks, and is never mentioned when their workload is discussed.
The third is the heaviest and is rarely put into words: responsibility without means. This person ends up holding passwords, installing things, deciding whether an incident deserves a call — and carrying all of that without anybody having entrusted it to them, which means they will carry it alone on the day something goes wrong.
Those three costs are settled by the three things in section 6, and none of them is a salary. What this person asks for, nearly always, is recognised time, a written framework, and the right to say no.
Counting, for a fortnight, on one sheet
Nobody knows what this role amounts to, and it has to be measured before anything can be decided — otherwise the conversation stays one impression against another.
We will publish no figure here, and the absence is a fact rather than caution: this work cannot be counted anywhere else. Its very function is to stop things becoming incidents, so the provider’s system never sees them, no timesheet records them, and the person themselves cannot reconstruct a week from memory.
The only instrument that can exist is a sheet kept by the person concerned, for a fortnight. Three columns: the time, who asked, and the subject in three words. Nothing else — no duration, no solution, no judgement.
A fortnight because it covers a billing cycle and an ordinary week, and is short enough for the sheet to be kept to the end. We have seen month-long records abandoned on day ten.
What the sheet reveals is nearly always the same and it is useful to both sides: the volume surprises the management and the distribution surprises the person. A large share of the requests come from two or three people, and a large share concern two or three subjects — which is exactly what section 8 deals with.
What is theirs, and what is not
The boundary is not drawn by technical difficulty — it is drawn by what is reversible.
What belongs to a relay: anything that undoes itself in two minutes. Restarting a printer, checking a cable, rebooting a machine, showing where a file is, explaining a function of a piece of software, running the four diagnostic steps before calling.
What does not: anything that undoes badly or not at all. Installing software, changing a network setting, modifying access rights, uninstalling something that gets in the way, touching a server.
The line is there because it protects the person as much as the company. A relay who installs software "that worked at home" has not made a technical mistake: they have taken a company decision without having been told they were allowed to, and they will be alone if it goes wrong.
One immediate practical consequence: the relay is the right person to do section 5’s preliminary checks and the wrong person to hold an administration account. Those two sentences do not contradict each other — that combination is precisely what makes the role sustainable.
What the relay does before the call
The best use of this role is not solving things: it is making the call to the provider short and accurate. The companion article explains that the first ten minutes decide the rest; the relay is what makes those ten minutes useful.
Four pieces of information, gathered before picking up, change the nature of the call: who, on which machine, since when, and what the person was doing exactly when it happened.
The fourth is the one always missing and it is worth the most. "Word does not work" is a sentence with no content; "when she prints a document containing an image, since Tuesday, on that workstation only" is half a diagnosis.
Two checks are added and cost nothing: does it happen on another machine, and does it happen for another person on the same machine. Those two questions halve the problem and the provider will ask them anyway.
It needs a five-line card, laminated, next to the relay’s workstation. It does not need to be longer, and a longer card is a card that goes unused — the same rule as for the outage register and the badge register.
The three things to give them
Naming the role without giving anything is worse than naming nothing, because it adds a responsibility without adding a means. Three things suffice and none costs money.
The first is recognised time. Two hours a week, said publicly, during which this person does this rather than their usual job — and during which their own backlog is accepted. It is the only one of the three requiring a management decision, and it settles section 2’s first cost.
The second is a channel. A notebook, an internal number, a messaging group — it hardly matters which, provided **one** exists and requests stop arriving as physical interruptions. The difference between twelve interruptions and twelve messages handled in two sittings is the difference between a lost morning and twenty minutes.
The third is the right to say no, written down and known to everybody. One sentence suffices: "anything touching installations, rights or the network goes to the provider". It is not there to protect the company, it is there so the person can point at a line rather than refuse in their own name.
What not to give, and it is the commonest request: an administration account. It turns the role into something else, it makes the person responsible for what they have no means of assessing, and the shares article explains why those accounts are counted on one hand.
What to hand them: one page
A single page, laminated, next to their workstation. It contains four things and the urge to add a fifth has to be resisted.
Section 5’s four diagnostic steps, with the two halving questions. The provider’s number, with the contract reference and the hours covered — that last item is nearly always missing and costs a quarter of an hour on every out-of-hours call.
The list of what is not theirs, in section 4’s words, so they can show it rather than explain it.
And the three or four steps particular to your business that come up constantly: where the box is restarted, how the trade application is relaunched, what the power-up order is. That last part is the only one requiring a little work, and it is filled in during half an hour with the provider.
That page is also what makes the role transferable, which is section 10’s subject. A relay without a page is an irreplaceable person; a relay with a page is a role somebody else can hold for three weeks of leave.
What the sheet reveals: the hidden training
Return to the fortnight’s sheet, because it holds information nobody expects and that is worth more than the count.
A large share of the requests are not faults. They are usage questions: how do I do this in this software, why does the document come out like that, where is this option set. They look like support and they are training.
It is a practical distinction rather than an academic one, because the two are not handled the same way. A fault is repaired once; a usage question comes back every week until somebody has shown the person how.
The sheet makes them visible because it carries the subject in three words, and the same subject appears four times in a fortnight. That is the moment to decide on half a day of training on that precise point, for three people, which costs less than a quarter of interruptions.
The companion article makes the same observation from the other end, in its section on support becoming training. What we add here is the means of seeing it: without the sheet, that information exists nowhere, since those requests never reached the provider.
The three things never to ask of them
This section is written to be shown. It is deliberately short, and its usefulness is that a person can point at it.
They are not asked to go around a security rule because it is urgent. Opening an access, sharing a password, disabling a protection: those requests always come from somebody in a hurry and entirely legitimate, and they put the relay in a position where refusing looks like obstruction.
They are not asked to look at what is happening on somebody else’s workstation. It happens more often than people think, it sometimes comes from management, and it is the act that permanently destroys a person’s standing in a team.
They are not asked to carry a purchasing decision alone. "What computers should we get?" is a question a relay answers willingly and will be held responsible for over four years. The equipment-purchase article exists for that question.
And a fourth, which is not a request but a drift: the relay must not become the only channel to the provider. If other people are no longer allowed to call, the business has created a bottleneck and a dependency on one person — which is exactly what the next section covers.
The single point of failure
This is the role’s counterpart and it has to be dealt with, because an article that only celebrated this person would be bad advice.
An effective relay gradually concentrates knowledge: what is plugged in where, which software was installed by whom, where the box’s password is, how the application is restarted. None of it is written down, because none of it was ever asked for in writing.
The test is simple and you can run it mentally in ten seconds: if this person is away for three weeks, what can no longer be done? If the answer holds more than two items, you have a dependency rather than a role.
The correction is section 7’s page and section 6’s channel, and it has a side effect the person concerned usually appreciates more than management expects: they can go on leave without receiving calls.
The second correction is a second relay, even on a very small share of time. Two people who know the four steps are worth far more than twice one, because the knowledge they pass to each other while covering is exactly the knowledge that never gets written down.
What the provider should do with this role
This section is addressed to us as much as to you, because the relationship between a provider and an internal relay is played badly in both directions.
The bad version on the provider’s side is treating this person as an obstacle: somebody who "tinkers" before calling and complicates the diagnosis. It happens and it produces a relationship where the relay no longer dares say what they tried, which is the worst possible situation for everybody.
The good version is training them, half a day a year, on the four steps and on what has changed in the installation. It costs half a day and it saves both sides travelling.
The bad version on the company’s side is using the relay to shrink the contract: fewer hours bought since somebody absorbs. It works for a year and it produces an exhausted person and a provider who no longer knows the installation.
The good version is the one we recommend and it is simple: the relay does what is reversible and prepares the calls, the provider does the rest, and the two speak once a quarter — in the same review meeting the maintenance article describes, where the relay’s presence changes the quality of what gets said.
What we do, and what we refuse to do
What we refuse first: giving an administration account to the internal relay because "it will be quicker". It is what we are asked for most on this subject, it would save us travelling, and it puts a person in a position of responsibility over things they have no means of assessing.
We also refuse to lean on this role to sell a smaller contract. A contract sized on the assumption that somebody will absorb is a contract that becomes false on the day they leave, and that day comes.
And we refuse to treat a relay as an ordinary user when they call. Somebody who has done the four checks has already supplied half the diagnosis, and making them run through the script from the beginning is the surest way to discourage them from doing it next time.
What we do gladly, and it takes half a day: section 7’s page written with the person, the four steps shown once, the list of what is not theirs approved with management, and their presence at the quarterly review.
And one thing to do this week without us: ask that person — you know who it is — to keep the three-column sheet for a fortnight. What you read afterwards will decide everything else, and it costs only the time of three words a line.
Frequently asked questions
Should the role be made official or left informal?
Name it, but only by giving section 6’s three things at the same time: recognised time, a single channel, and a written right to say no. Naming the role without giving anything is worse than leaving it informal, because it adds a responsibility without adding a means.
Where is the limit of what a relay can do?
Not at technical difficulty: at reversibility. Anything that undoes itself in two minutes — restarting, checking a cable, rebooting, showing where a file is — is theirs. Anything that undoes badly or not at all — installing, changing a network setting, modifying rights — is not. The line protects the person as much as the company.
Should they have an administration account?
No, and it is the commonest request on this subject. It turns the role into something else and makes the person responsible for what they cannot assess. The combination that makes the role sustainable is precisely the reverse: the relay is the right person for the checks before the call and the wrong person to hold an administration account.
How do we know what this role really amounts to?
A sheet kept by the person for a fortnight, three columns: the time, who asked, the subject in three words. It is the only possible instrument — the provider’s system never sees these requests, since the relay’s function is precisely to stop them becoming incidents. The volume surprises management and the distribution surprises the person.
A lot of requests keep coming back. Is that normal?
Yes, and it means they are not faults. A subject appearing four times in a fortnight is a usage question, which is to say training: a fault is repaired once, a usage question returns every week until somebody has shown the person how. Half a day of training on that precise point costs less than a quarter of interruptions.
What happens if that person leaves?
Run the test in ten seconds: if they are away for three weeks, what can no longer be done? More than two items and you have a dependency rather than a role. The two corrections are a single page next to their workstation and a second relay, even on a very small share of time — the knowledge two people pass to each other while covering is exactly what never gets written down.
Where we come in
You already know who that person is. What you do not know is how many hours a week they spend repairing something that is not their job.
- We write with them what they may do, and what they must refuse.
- We show them four moves that remove half the interruptions.
- We treat them as a colleague when they call, not as an ordinary user.
We will not give them an administrator account because it would be quicker: the day they leave that account stays open and nobody remembers it.
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