From: hartr@redhat.com
Date: Wed, 5 Aug 1998 15:03:31 +0100 (BST)
Subject: Red Hat installation support - it does exist, but it is backlogged 
To: sup-manager@redhat.com

Hi

I am responding here as there has been a growing number of complaints
about Red Hat intallation support, which is one of my responsibilities.

We are currently running at approximately 7 business days turn round on
installation support. This is not only terribly frustrating to all our
users, it is most assuredly not our quality target: we are aiming to
have all installation support tickets answered by a human being in one
business day.

In order to handle this backlog, we have switched staff off essential
(but not immediately critical) tasks, such as working on the support web
site documentation. All our engineers are also working well beyond the
call of duty.

We estimate that we will have caught up to our quality target of a
single business day turn round by the end of August (and possibly sooner
if we can bring on new staff faster than currently appears to be the
case).

We realise that this leaves many of our users frustrated and
disappointed - something we do not like to see. All we can do is to beg
your indulgence and patience, and provide you with our guarantee that
we will extend any user's 90 day support period if it runs out due to
these delays.

For those people that want to know why this happened, there are several
reasons why we have become so backlogged. We also have plans in place to
avoid this recurring:-

1) with the release of Red Hat 5.1, the support system leapt up
   radically in terms of messages.

   This was because our sales increased dramatically - not because Red
   Hat 5.1 was buggy! We have clear stats from the support system that
   show each release is generating LESS installation support
   requirements per unit sold. The number of installation support
   tickets is going up because we are selling so much more Red Hat
   Linux!

2) we lost staff at the time of the release of Red Hat 5.1 - this meant
   that the workload shot up for the remaining engineers - despite
   having added staff to meet the anticipated load due to increased
   sales (the best laid plans of mice and men...)!

3) we have been attempting to hire support engineers to fill the vacant
   positions AND add the staff we need to handle the larger than
   expected load. We have made two job offers this week and are waiting
   to hear if they have been accepted.

   We are still looking for more support engineers though - so if you
   are interested in working at Red Hat, send us your resume!

4) We are working on an improved support system that will provide
   immediate information to users about their installation problems
   when they enter a ticket, which will handle many users' needs. This
   will be in place in September.

5) We are completely revamping our knowledgebase. This will contain all
   the security and errata items and our support engineers will be
   actively adding information to this. We are also considering ways to
   add (in a quality tested way) the wealth of information on lists such
   as this is included in the knowledgebase.

   It is our aim for this to become an easily usable tool for users of
   all experience to track down and solve their Linux related problems.

I realise that this message is not what people want to hear - but Red
Hat believes strongly that 'open' should apply as much as possible to
what it does, not just to software. We are open about our successes -
now we need to be honest about the problem in installation support.

All we can do is to ask "Please bear with us" as we cope with a function
of success - rapid growth.

-- 

Robert Hart						hartr@redhat.com
Director, Supprot Services
Red Hat Software Inc.		Phone: +1-919-547-0012 	Fax: +1-919-547-0024
4201 Research Commons Suite 100, 79 TW Alexander Dr., Research Triangle Park,
			NC 27709, USA


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