Brian Ferris: "A global team effort"

"In the end, the best part is seeing our colleagues in Italy, Dublin, the U.S. and around the world uniting to get it done," said Brian Ferris.

As Brian Ferris will tell you, "it's been a pretty hectic few days."

Brian is an Operations Analytics Leader with IBM Cloud, based in Nebraska. He works with the Global Cloud support teams—the IBMers who take incoming calls, chats and cases from clients who need assistance. Keeping those employees available to clients during a pandemic that has shut down cities and forced hundreds of thousands of IBMers around the world to work from home has been an enormous technological challenge.

"We enabled our first-line support teams to take those calls from home using a soft-phone client"—an application that allows team members to securely access IBM systems from their laptops, Brian says. It took a series of 14- and 16-hour days, he says, to equip teams, install software, execute licenses and configure the systems that will enable IBM to continue serving clients in the weeks to come.

Shifting a critical workflow from IBM offices to IBMers' homes "has been a global team effort," Brian says. It's essential that IBM's support teams remain "enabled, empowered, and have the tools they need," he says, adding, "They're the face of IBM."

IBM support teams were forced to quickly change the way they work at a time when being there for clients is, arguably, more important than ever. As the pandemic has swept through countries around the world, clients are also grappling with the new reality—transforming their workflows and using technology in new ways.

As the coronavirus has spread, support teams worldwide have gone above and beyond to help one another, coordinating staffing and shifting volumes among geographies to balance the workload. "In the end, the best part is seeing our colleagues in Italy, Dublin, the U.S. and around the world uniting to get it done," Brian says. "I've had so many people offer to help."

Brian has made himself available to IBMers needing help whenever possible, often staying up late at night—then rising early the next morning to assist with setup and installation. While much of the time is spent focusing on installation, documentation and testing of communication channels, he takes a moment on each call for a personal check-in. "None of us has ever seen anything on this scale," he notes. "In these interactions with people, I think it's important to take a moment to ask, 'Are you okay? Is there anything you need?'" 

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