Support: garage and small things
Support is the term for things below the project level, that do not have extensive tracking. The main characteristic is the customers come to us with requests we can handle and don’t need to think about long-term. In other words, doing things short-term and without needing to schedule our time long-term.
Everyone should save around 20% of their time for meetings, garage support, self-learning, etc. (It may be much larger for some people).
Reporting and tracking
Record each help session in the garage diary git repository. You don’t need any other major reporting. (Try naturally ask the info, don’t ask specially. Remember to ask at the start and try to make it a natural part of “getting to know you”.)
This may be called the “garage diary” but should be used for other ad-hoc questions and contacts.
Do add an entry for each meeting you do - you don’t have to calculate the duration of meetings. We hope that long-term, number of meetings is proportional to who we support.
The main purpose is so that we can help visitors across visits if (for example) the first person who helped them isn’t there the next day.
There is no need to record things that are already in another tracking system, like the Triton issue tracker or eSupport.
Garage support
You can choose who to help in garage. Work with others in the garage to figure out who does what (sometimes you may need to “take one for the team”).
It’s OK to say if we really can’t do something, or redirect them to better support, or give them homework reading to do before coming back to do more.
If you ever see customers that need interventions (completely not prepared to do their work, lack of supervision, mental health crisis, coming back too often, etc.), talk to your supervisor.
If garage starts to get overloaded, bring it up it the weekly RSE meeting.
Small support
These are small extensions of garage support, which you work on outside the garage time.
You shouldn’t promise anything you can’t do within the few days (this shouldn’t become a long-term mental burden for you). If it’s more than that, it should become a project, or they should come back when it’s time to begin.
The customer should be the “prime mover”, not you. That means you do what you can, but it’s on the customer to come back and make sure that things get managed over time. Make sure this is clear to the customer.
You usually meet in garage but can schedule meetings outside of that time, too. Record each meeting in the garage diary.
Reporting: this is mixed in with the garage reporting.
Example report outputs
This section shows what kind of reports we can make with the data, so you can see the purposes of the reports - if you can see the output, that may help with motivation to produce the data. See 2025 Aalto RSE report.
This shows the positions of garage customers. Leadership likes to see that we support a variety of people, with emphasis of PhD students.
This chart, and all of them, has a numerical value on the vertical axis, but as it says, the data is incomplete since not everyone remembers to add entries. This makes it a bit difficult to explain the results.
Like above, but this shows the departments of attendees. This shows a broad benefit and helps to secure more funding.
Like above, but broken down by department. Having structured data lets us make this report.