What your IT department can learn from McDonalds
Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 7:36PM
McDonalds LogoNo, I am not recommending that you have your Network Admins dress up as clowns in order to bring in more revenue, although that would be hilarious and might just work :). However, I do think that there is a lot to learn from the largest fast food chain that is in the top 500 largest companies in the world. McDonalds offers their customers 5 things that they do extremely well.
- Speed
- Reliability
- Quality
- Excitement
- Comfort
Speed
Being in the fast food industry, they need to get their product to their customers as quickly as possible. The average wait from placing the order to receiving the food for a drive through customer is 2 minutes and 36 seconds, although some franchises have gotten that average down to just over 1 minute. When you think about it, that is completely and utterly amazing.
Reliability
No matter where you travel across the USA, or much of the world, you can find a McDonald's that is serving pretty much the same food. A BigMac can be bought just about anywhere on the planet, and that is pretty amazing.
Quality
I know some people will disagree with this, citing books like Fast Food Nation, but they provide at the very least a decent hamburger nearly anywhere in the world. The food just tastes good, at least to the majority of Americans. This kind of ties into Reliability, but if McDonalds served sh*tty food all across the world they wouldn't be in business for very long, so I think quality and reliability are justifiably different categories.
Excitement
I think most adults in America look this over, but if you were going to a McDonalds (or any fast food restaurant) for the first time, you would probably be pretty excited. 
They package the burgers and fries in colorful cardboard and you open it up like it is a present. I know that when I was a kid my sisters and I loved going to McDonalds, there were slides and balls and all sorts of stuff to get a child excited. In short, McDonald's was like Christmas morning for food.
Comfort
McDonalds food is what I would call comfort food. Almost everyone has had it and probably attaches feelings of being with family and friends to eating it. Most of the food is greasy and warm, making you feel at ease and safe. Heck, they even give you the option of not even getting out of your car to get your food, you can just stay sitting in the car listening to your favorite radio station.
What can IT learn?
IT can learn a lot. If all IT departments provided speed, reliability, quality, excitement and comfort, they would be loved a whole lot more. None of what I am going to say is revolutionary, most of it is just common sense, but some of these things are easily overlooked when you are in the trenches and just trying to keep up with all the day to day stuff.
Improve your speed
There are a lot of ways to improve your speed, but probably the most important thing you can do is to prioritize the requests that come in. Not all requests that come into the IT department are high priority, while others need to be handled very quickly. For example, when a request comes in asking to get a users computer back up and running due to a hardware failure, that is very high priority as the user probably cannot accomplish much without their computer. If a user is just putting a request in for some more space in their personal network folder as it is beginning to fill up, that can be put at a low priority.
How can you track all of this? Even if you are the single IT person for your company I would highly recommend setting up some sort of help ticket application. An excellent free and open source option is Request Tracker. At the company I work at we use it, and it is a easy to use ticketing application that allows us to prioritize customer work.
Reliability
All to often I see mid-sized companies (100+ users) still setting up their workstations from scratch. This is a bad use of your time and all to often results in you missing a software installation or a setting, which means that first experience the user has with their new PC isn't a good one. In order to save time and ensure that workstations are loaded out the same way everytime, get a process in place for automatically installing the OS and applications. A great way to do this is to use Microsoft's free SysPrep tool, check out this great tutorial and how to create a image and then image new machines with it. A part of this process should be creating a document that lays out a specific model of desktop or laptop to purchase, as this will make creating the image much easier. You should NOT be letting your users pick what desktop or laptop they want to use, unless it is the CEO or someone similarly powerful where they could fire you if you told them no :).
If you are a very small company and creating a image seems like it would take more time than what it is worth, there is another option. Simply create a checklist of all the things that should be done to every PC, including joining it to the workgroup or domain, installing specific software packages, settings Windows Update up etc.
Quality
Your IT infrastructure needs to be reliably good, not reliably crappy. At the basic level, you should purchase business class servers and switches. If you have more than 10 PC's, there is no reason to have a Linksys being your sole piece of network equipment. If Cisco is too expensive, than take a look at Juniper or 3COM. Your server doesn't have to be very expensive either, Dell offers tower servers for not much more than $1,000. Desktops and laptops should be replaced every 3-5 years, and you should have a support contract with your vendor of choice (Dell, IBM, HP etc.). If running Windows, ensure that all client PC's are set to receive Windows updates. If you are on a larger network take a look at Windows Server Update Services which will save on bandwidth and allow you to ensure that all PC's are indeed getting their updates.
Another very important area to look at is documentation of your network. Having solid documentation is every bit important as a solid network, because without good documentation your network won't be easily maintainable and will quickly fall into disarray. A lot of people use Wiki's for writing down documentation in a team setting, but if you are the only IT person throwing some Word and Viso documents on the shared drive is perfectly acceptable.
Excitement
Once you have provided a reliable IT infrastructure for your users, it is time to make them excited! 
The more that other departments love you, the more job security for you and your co-workers will have, and that is never a bad thing. Consider creating a cart and decorate it with some colorful paper or a bell or something, and then when a user is getting a new PC take it down in the cart. This will make users excited at the prospect of dealing with the IT department, which is much better than having them scream at you :).
Comfort
Rolling out the latest and greatest software package is great, but useless if your users don't know how to use it. A large part of your job is really user training. If you have ever worked at a help desk, think of how many calls you received that had nothing to do with a big or network issue. Oftentimes users call the help desk simply because they have no idea how to do something, or don't understand that the application isn't capable of doing what they think it can. If your company doesn't have the resources to dedicate to full time user training, then consider something a little more informal. At my job we have Lunch & Learns every other week, and these have been a great way for getting the IT departments ideas and knowledge out to the rest of the company. Basically, choose something that you have seen a lot of people asking questions about and create a powerpoint and write down some notes to talk about it. Then, let people know the company is providing lunch next week and that they should stop by for the lunch and to learn about the super duper new software package that will solve everyone's problems if only they knew how to use it!
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