rationed support

A rationed support scheme accounts for end user support explicitly, permitting only a certain amount of support time or cost before invoking a charge or penalty or some remedial training, e.g. in telework best practices or office best practices.

It is a way to indirectly reward good performers by ensuring that poor performers are singled out - but also assisted, so that they do not remain a burden on overall efficiency.

For instance, many end users in office settings ask fellow workers to solve their systems problems, and many of these are glad to comply, despite the fact that they aren't being paid to do that job, and probably are not capable of doing it correctly. In any rationed support setting, however, there may be a shame or stigma avoidance incentive to ask one's fellows instead of the mandated support line.

So, while to monitor and ration and remedially train is clearly a signal infrastructure best practice, given the possible side effects, it may not be a team best practice especially if there is stigma or shame associated with asking for help (as in quite a few cultures). Thus:

Sometimes it may be more effective to refer to the rationing of support as if it were a plus or bonus to be given training, that is, as a "reward" for asking for help to get quickly working again. In this case a term like "rationed" is all-advised and one more like teamwork award could be used. Though that obscures genuine team-granted awards like barnstars and management-granted awards like stock options, which are much more valid as a reward for teamwork.

Where only infra terms are used, however, people are expected to accept and understand the whole organization's need to ration support and to assist their fellows only to use correct terms and diagnostics. Therefore obscuring the actual operational description of what is really going on isn't advised. See also cult of integrity.

A wiki revert currency, as proposed for use in some large public wikis, is a way to single out and reward those who assist their fellows by reverting wiki vandalism or correcting simple errors: reverts that stand the test of time are rewarded while those that are undone by subsequent reverts that themselves stand, or re-inclusions of deleted text that could have been edited (not reverted) by the original editor, are punished, by standings in a scoring or inhouse credit scheme. This is a sophisticated __rationed support)) scheme, in that those users who are generating support burdens on others, lose currency, as those who act to undo their errors, gain it.

It is however only appropriate where there is an equal power relationship among players and also where everyone's job includes a roughly equal requirement to monitor and undo any errors. Or, perhaps, where larger amounts of revert currency are granted those who are tasked with the jobs most likely to cause them to use up their credit. For instance, deleting whole articles (which could be omitted from the scheme entirely) or moving incoherent text to talk pages to be debated, with the intent of restoring much or all of it to the article.