This summer I became a manager of a help desk team for large enterprise headquarters. I don't know anything about basic help desk work and was learning on the job.
Focus on the basics first. Know what success is and strive for that before drilling down into any technical junk. Here is what I did different job:
1. I did nothing for the first two weeks. I observed operations and talked to people. I looked at how people worked, observed personalities, observed personal performance, and looked for failures. I tried to find as many gaps and problems as I could and refused to jump in with solutions.
2. I wrote a new help desk ticket application from scratch and launched it within 2 weeks.
3. After a month in the job I moved people around. This was partially forced on me. I threw out seniority in some cases to ensure the correct personalities were in the correct positions. This meant I had to fire my second in command and promote somebody to replace him.
4. I focused on only two things: improvements to customer service and productivity. Before the new ticket system came online we had 125 open tickets. WTF. My goal was to get down to 20 open tickets. My boss's goal, which I guess is all that really matters, was to get down to 0 open tickets. We eventually did it, but we had to focus on customer service and productivity.
5. Reward your high achievers. This is much harder than it sounds. In a fast moving operational environment your top performers tend to get worked to death, because you know they are more dependable. That is so not fair, but it is what happens.
This was a temporary job. It ended and I went back to being a software developer. In reflection I was only moderately successful. I should have been a much better manager, but I was too busy being a technician because I lacked trust and faith in several of my subordinate managers. If management is doing everybody else's job then they aren't doing theirs.
A large part of that management failure was reporting enterprise failures to the VIPs. The VIPs only wanted to hear from the team leader, me, which means I had to be personally engaged on the things they would shit themselves over. Next time I will create a dashboard of VIP concerns and order my subordinate managers to brief the VIPs so that I can strictly be a leader/administrator.