10 ways to help solve probelms at work

Everyone's busy, don't just leave problems hopping someone else will solve them. Treat it as learning experience. It should be OK to ask for help, but make an honest attempt to work on a problem, then you will be able to ask better questions. You will be appreciated for trying. The more problems you handle, the more easily the solutions will flow. Having solved two unrelated problems in the past, will give you the key to solving a new problem in the future.

Problems usually repeat themselves because there is a deeper problem which is the real cause. This is why airlines are so safe. If there is a broken part, they don't just replace the part, they find out why it broke in the first place. Then fix that problem so we don't have more broken parts.

If something goes wrong, and you need another team to solve it, make sure you give them all the information they need to find the problem. Something like "My print button doesn't work" is not going to help. Often you will need to be contacted at some point during the problem solving process. But if you give enough information up front, the first contact you get might be to say its fixed, saving all parties a lot of time.

Some problems need help from more than one team. If you have been working on a problem and need to hand over to another team, make sure you pass on your knowledge of the problem so far. Re frame the problem and make it easier to understand for the next team. Business teams and technical teams use different language, make sure the team getting the problem can understand it.

While your working on a problem, keep notes detailed enough so that you or someone else can understand the process and what you have found. Sometimes its an iterative process, passing back and forth between more than one team. When a problem comes back, we don't want to spend any time red-doing what was already done. Also when a similar problem comes in, this will help us out next time.

Sometimes there are more problems than we can handle. When a new problem comes in, we need to work out its priority relative to the others. The make sure the highest priority is being looked after first.

Different problems impact different teams. Its important to understand which teams are impacted, and try getting the right problems to the right people to action. Some times customers may need to be informed of a problem and whats been done to fix it. The team doing the notification may not be the same team that fixed it.

If a problem is not urgent, and we are finding multiple instances of a like problem, send them all as a group to be fixed. Solving the first instance will usually provide the solution for the other like problems. This will save time by allowing them all to be solved as a group instead of individually. It also means we probably have a root cause problem to solve, see idea 2.

Blaming someone for a problem is just wasted energy. What ever the problem is, its happened, just work on resolving it. Keep going back to idea 2, until all the root causes are dealt with, then the problem will be gone

Not all problems need to be resolved. If the impact of a problem is small, sometimes it can be left. But be careful. Make sure your not the only one determining the impact. For example if your company has a something like a voice service that allows customers to get their information via phone with only a small number of users. You might be tempted to think a problem in this system is a small, until you discover that many of its users depend on it because they are blind. In this case if we cant or wont fix the problem we need an alternative for those that depend on it being fixed.