When I joined Global Payments to lead the Tier 2 Integrations & Developer Support team, technical escalations were handled through a shared team mailbox and a small set of phone lines, with no dedicated ticketing or service-desk platform in place. On-call coverage relied on a single physical mobile handset that was handed from one engineer to the next at each shift change — at times relayed by taxi courier between locations — rather than through any automated system. My focus was building the operational foundation the team needed to scale: structured intake and tracking for support requests, and a resilient, automated on-call model that didn't depend on a single physical device changing hands.

Service Desk Consolidation

Rather than introduce an entirely new platform, I extended the engineering organization's existing Jira instance with a Jira Service Desk license, giving the support team a purpose-built intake and tracking layer on a tool engineers already used daily. Every incoming request — previously an email in a shared inbox — became a tracked ticket with an owner, a status, and a history, giving both the support team and Engineering a single, auditable source of truth for open technical issues.

Impact:

• Replaced an untracked shared mailbox with a structured, auditable ticket queue, giving the team visibility into ownership, status, and history for every request.
• Gave Engineering and Support a shared system of record for the first time, reducing duplicated effort and requests that a shared inbox made easy to lose track of.
• Built on the engineering team's existing Jira instance rather than introducing a separate support platform, keeping the workflow familiar for engineers already working in Jira every day.
• Contributed to a 15–20% improvement in complex-case resolution for the team, alongside the structured coaching and process refinement this consolidation supported.

On-Call Reliability & Call Routing

The team's on-call model depended on a single shared mobile handset, physically transferred between whoever was on call — a fragile setup with an obvious single point of failure. I secured a phone allowance so each on-call engineer used their own device, and implemented automatic call routing so incoming on-call calls reached the current on-call engineer directly, without depending on a handset being in the right hands at the right time.

Impact:

• Removed a single physical point of failure from the on-call process, along with the manual, in-person handset handoff it required.
• Gave engineers on-call coverage from their own device, on their own schedule, independent of a physical handoff between shifts.
• Established a call-routing model built to scale as the team grew, rather than one that became more fragile with every additional rotation member.

Both changes shared the same underlying approach: build on infrastructure and tools the organization and team already knew — the existing Jira instance, each engineer's own phone — rather than introducing something entirely new to learn. That's a pattern I look for in most operational environments I join: find the process that depends on a single fragile point, whether that's a shared inbox or a single physical device, and replace it with something structured and resilient.