ZenDesk Swarm Day

Last Friday was ZenDesk Swarm Day. What’s a swarm day? I’m glad you asked!

A productivity technique

A swarm day is a productivity technique I learned from the software development community. In the process of developing software, you can’t help but accumulate tasks that aren’t of high enough value to put into the regular work flow. It’s sometimes referred to as “technical debt” because you know at some point you’re going to have to pay it back.  When the tasks add up to something meaningful, a manager assigns a group of developers to “swarm” and resolve the debt. Truthfully, the debt is never eliminated, but the idea is to bring it back down to an acceptable amount.

In this case, we decided to tackle a variety of tasks related to ZenDesk, our tool for managing and tracking client support issues. It’s an outstanding tool for this purpose, but it has been underutilized at Simplifya because the majority of our feedback comes in via the sales team. It means that our efforts to address the feedback are not tracked and we are missing an opportunity to gain valuable data points.

But it’s difficult to ask users and our sales team to redirect their feedback to ZenDesk when it’s lacking in content. We’ve tried in the past to solicit help from others. As Mark can attest, it’s not that easy and it’s hard to make time to write individual help articles. And so the tool mostly just sat in the garage, sort of like my brother-in-law’s 1969 Ford Bronco, waiting for someone to show it some love!

Swarm Day

As our guilt about the state of ZenDesk grew, John, Dave, and I finally agreed to do something about it. We picked a day (more like an afternoon) to isolate ourselves from the office – no offense to any of you in the office – and swarm on ZenDesk. Dave put together an agenda and a set of writing guidelines to keep us on track. We took our laptops to Baere Brewing Company and drank some liquid courage to start the session. Without liquid courage, you’re not swarming, you’re just working!

I’ll spare you the gory details and share that we were able to write 22 help articles in just a few hours. We filled several gaps in coverage across MJB and TPA user types. The articles focused on audits, settings, and the newly-released document storage module. On top of that, we were able to help John through a couple of sticky support issues.

Our guilt has been alleviated, at least temporarily! ZenDesk is looking much better and we’re a couple of steps closer to making it ready for prime time. Goal accomplished!