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Why every team needs a Troubleshooting Coach

January 17, 2020 By Andrew

If you manage a team of technical people – maybe VoIP engineers or CO techs – and there’s a big technical problem, your job is to ask the right questions. To be the Troubleshooting Coach.

Troubleshooting Coach for football?

You don’t need to be a technical expert yourself. In fact, you can often reach a solution more quickly by asking good questions than by diving deep into the details – and it’s your job as the team manager to make sure this happens.

As an engineer (and I speak from personal experience) it’s easy to dive into the technical details of a problem – log files, SAS traces, Wireshark captures, configuration files – and spend hours analyzing all this data.

And since phone networks tend to be complex, there can be a lot of data.

If a group of engineers are all troubleshooting together on a conference call it can be even worse – as everyone individually dives into a different pool of data, and then distracts each other on a variety of tangents.

This is often counter-productive. So whether you’re a manager, a VoIP engineer, an IP engineer or a switch tech, we need to challenge ourselves to ask the right questions – so we can spend time looking for the right answers.

Troubleshooting Coach: Asks good questions

As you read through this list of questions, some of them will seem obvious. That’s a good thing – it means you’re already thinking along the right lines.

The challenge is to think clearly in the midst of a problem. To realize that the discussion is going nowhere. To realize that we don’t have a clear strategy for solving the problem – and that’s when you, as the Troubleshooting Coach need to call a time-out, and return to these bedrock troubleshooting questions.

  1. Can we describe the problem, using specifics?
  2. When did the problem start?
  3. What changed at that time?
  4. In what situations does the problem occur, and in what situations does it not occur?
  5. Can we do some testing to tweak those situations to identify one key difference?
  6. Which pieces of equipment are involved in the problem?
  7. Can we eliminate some of that equipment from the call path, and does the problem still occur?
  8. What diagnostics do we have available, and what diagnostics do we need?
  9. How could we workaround this issue temporarily to reduce the impact?
  10. What expertise do we need to understand this better – and who has it (e.g. vendors, IT support, consultants)?

If you want a more comprehensive approach for thinking about troubleshooting check out our DAMT troubleshooting framework.

We often play the role of troubleshooting coach for those clients who have us on a monthly retainer – where we can provide that outside perspective AND a deep technical understanding if needed – but a lot of the value comes simply from asking the right questions.

Whether you’re technical or not, a good troubleshooting coach will help everyone to slow down, ask the right questions, and focus on resolving the issue quickly and safely.

That’s the most important role a manager or supervisor can play in a crisis, and you don’t need to be a technical expert to do it well.

About Andrew

Award Consulting is focused on helping ILECs and CLECs who use Metaswitch products to thrive as they improve their networks through migrations, strategic projects and improved service offerings.

Our goal is to create highly specific, highly valuable content targeted specifically at US regional service providers, and especially those who are running Metaswitch equipment. Join our email list to be notified of new content.

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Our goal is to create highly specific, highly valuable content targeted specifically at US regional service providers, and especially those who are running Metaswitch equipment. Join our email list to be notified of new content.



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