The stories behind the numbers
Introduction
The narratives on this page are to give context to our ITSM Metrics page. The two pages work side by side. (We would have liked to get the dynamic reporting and the associated narratives on one page but our tool does not allow for that.) There are two different types of charts: bar/line charts that show two years worth of information and pie charts which show the most recent year (rolling 12 months). There are three main sections:
- Major incidents - unplanned issues or outages which affect more than one person for which we do not have a fix or workaround
- Incidents - situations where something is not working as you think it should
- Survey responses - you know what these are. What you might not know is that if you take the time to tell us what went well or didn't go well, we act on your information.
Here are the stories that go along with the reports...
Major Incidents
1a) Unplanned interruptions or reductions in quality of an IT service
Goal: Zero.
(Major incidents affect more than one person for which we do not have a fix or workaround. An "outage" is just one example of a major incident.)
After a major incident has occurred, we do problem management which gets us to the root of the problem. We then make changes to help ensure that the incident won't happen again. We have more ability to do that for incidents internal to UWRF but we also try to find ways to allow people to keep going even when the incident was caused by something outside UWRF.
1b) Unplanned interruptions or reductions in quality of an IT service by priority (1 year)
Goal: Zero.
We classify these based on impact and urgency which gives us a priority level.
- Impact is the number of people the incident is affecting: 2 people, an office, a department, a building, the whole campus
- Urgency is the importance of the service that is not working: the calculator app in Windows won’t open vs. the entire campus network is down
- Having impact and urgency, we get a priority level: Low, Medium, High, or Emergency
1c) Emergency level total downtime (in hours)
Goal: Zero.
The most accurate picture we have of downtime across the various systems is through our ticketing system. (A ticket is a way for DoTS to gather and keep track of all the information about an issue.) When we become aware of a major incident we create a ticket to gather and track information about it. When the incident is fixed or there is a workaround, we resolve the ticket. The amount of downtime is calculated from ticket creation to resolution. We add all these together and group the times by the month the ticket is created.
Incidents
2a) Incidents (break/fix)
Goal: Zero.
Incidents are situations where something is not working as you think it should. Incidents are also known as "break/fix".
2b) Incidents (break/fix) - first contact resolution
Goal: All incident tickets.
Whether you contact us by phone, email, chat, or online form, we want your issue to be solved as quickly as possible - as soon as you first contact us. You can see we help solve many issues on first contact and the people that help you the vast majority of the time are our Service Center student employees.
Part of our mission at DoTS is to hire students in order to help them grow as people. DoTS gives them ample opportunities to develop and hone communication and problem solving skills - experience that pays dividends when pursuing their careers.
2c) Incidents (break/fix) by category (1 year)
Goal: Zero.
Hey, we don't want people to have any issues with their technology. But people do. Ever wonder what, in general, people need help fixing the most? Here is your answer.