The IBM Support Overnight Mystery

Several days this week I have worked on a different PMR (two ST bugs one CCM more on later) with people from IBM support who have been helpful, informed and as curious about the problem as I was (or faking it really really well) . We’ve had screen shares, investigated the problem and left it at the end of day the as “escalate to L3 development”.

Then each morning I wake up to an overnight email from someone new saying they are in charge of the PMR but who has seemingly never seen the problem and is asking me to do basic stuff like send in logs or apply a patch that was already checked (and updated in the PMR) at least a day earlier.

I understand the difficulties in providing 24×7 support and I’m sure there’s an alert somewhere that gives someone a kick overnight and tells them I HAVE to be followed up even if there’s no action task back from L3. Clearly there is a process for “following up” out of hours which does exactly that and only that based on the original call. I now reluctantly set those emails to ignore , or respond asking them to read the PMR history, but I worry what customers do .

Do they run around in circles doing this repeat “make work” until someone who has read the actual updates comes in ?

Oh and two out of the three PMRs are now closed. I will blog both which are interesting and apparently a googlewhack of problems (we were the first to report) later today. :-). So thank you to everyone who worked with me on them this week.