Monthly Archives: May 2014

Involve yourself in the Service Excellence project

Leave a reply

The project team desperately needs your feedback on the processes, tools, and training that are being created for the July 21 launch of our new Incident Management, Service Catalog Management, and Request Fulfillment processes using TeamDynamix.

calendarThe team has completed our first build of the Incident Management process. During the 2 demos and 6 focus group sessions thus far, we’ve received excellent feedback about ways to improve the process, the underlying tool configuration, and the training materials. We want more! We ask you to reserve the following dates and times so you know when the next opportunity to engage with the project take place.

  • 4 June (Wednesday) 10 am – 10.50 am: Service Catalog Tool Configuration Demo (build 1)
  • 6 June (Friday) 10 am – 11:50 am: Service Catalog Focus Groups (topics TBD)
  • 11 June (Wednesday) 10 am – 10:50 am: Service Catalog Tool Configuration Demo (build 2)
  • 13 June (Friday) 10 am – 11:50 am: Service Catalog Focus Groups (topics TBD)
  • 25 June (Wednesday) 10 am – 10:50 am: Request Fulfillment Tool Configuration Demo (build 1)
  • 27 June (Friday) 10 am – 11:50 am: Request Fulfillment Focus Groups (topics TBD)
  • 2 July (Wednesday) 10 am – 10:50 am: Request Fulfillment Tool Configuration Demo (build 2)
  • 2 July (Wednesday) 1 pm – 2:50 pm: Request Fulfillment Focus Groups (topics TBD)

There will be a multitude of official training that takes place during the week prior to launch (July 14 – 18). Stay tuned for specific session information.

We will continue to send reminders as each session approaches, with more details about the specific topics being covered in the focus groups. If you cannot make any of these sessions, you can still engage by commenting on our blog posts or seeking us out in Boyd 102. We will gladly work to incorporate your feedback into improving these processes.

Improving Miami’s Wireless Network

Leave a reply

As we move into the summer months, the NETS team has been working on plans for our annual wireless improvement projects.

Over the summer we will be deploying approximately 400 – 500 new access points in Residence Halls and Academic / State buildings, which will bring our number of wireless AP’s on campus to over 2500.

We are also investigating / planning the deployment of a wireless assessment tool. This tool will have dedicated sensors monitoring and reporting on user experiences in a handful of residence halls. More importantly, we expect the chosen system will have the ability to support remote sensors to monitor individual rooms or areas that are experiencing issues. We expect to have this system in place before the start of school to establish a baseline and then be able to see the affect of students moving in and beginning to use the wireless network.

The wireless controller issues that plagued the wireless network have been resolved, and our new wireless controller hardware provided by Cisco has continued to perform as expected through the Spring semester. Going into the school year, we will be running a stable version of code that has been well tested in the wireless environment at Miami.

With the technical issues hopefully behind us, our focus will again turn towards the students and improving our methods of communicating with them and working towards ensuring the highest levels of service that they expect. We will once again be holding our Wireless Tent Event the first few weeks of the school year, and after that, we expect to do some outreach into the residence halls that continue to have issues with evening support sessions.

If there are other ideas on how we can further communicate and encourage students to report issues to the Support Desk, please let us know.

 

Incident? What Incident? I don’t do incidents

Leave a reply

Have you ever found yourself in one of these situations?

  • A client contacts you directly about a problem they are having with some application

  • You notice that an application is misbehaving and fix it before anyone else even notices

  • spilled-coffee

    You get an alert form a monitoring system that something is malfunctioning (or about to be)

If so, you have been participating in the incident management process – perhaps without even knowing it. To make sure that all our clients have a consistent experience in the future, the Service Excellence project is formalizing that process.

The good news: Everyone will have the ability to record incidents

The bad news: Everyone will have the ability to record incidents

The team’s goal is to make the new incident management process as easy to use as possible. The training we create will set a clear understanding of the steps to be followed and how an incident moves through the process in a predictable way.

“I don’t have time for that!” you say? While the ideal end state is that all incident management is handled by the Support Desk, we know that ideal does not equal ourreality. We all need to work to help our clientssee the value for them in the efficiency of having all incidents managed through the  experts in the Support Desk. But until the ideal becomes reality, we hope more and more IT staff members will work with the Support Desk to become the incident recording experts.

For our part, we will keep it as simple as possible using the process strategy and design approved by our leadership as a guide.

Join us in our focus groups to provide direct feedback or comment below!

Next TeamDynamix Demo Wednesday 5/21 at 10 am

Leave a reply

The Service Excellence project team has finished the second build of our Incident Management process for the July release. Come join us for a demo in 104 Brown Road or watch the WebEx via the link on the program Google site:

https://sites.google.com/a/miamioh.edu/service-excellence-project/

The demo includes:

  • Updates to the incident logging process based on feedback from the focus groups:
    • Updated Statuses
    • Changes to default notify and privacy settings
    • Updated incident Sources
    • Establish policy for re-opening of incidents
  • Preview the Major Incident process
  • Preview the Functional Escalation process
  • Time permitting: Review basic navigation for anyone who may have missed our last demo

Hope to see you there!

 

No more Outages!

Leave a reply

Now wouldn’t that be nice!? The Service Excellence project will launch a new Major Incident process which makes radical departures from our current practices.

  • We will no longer have incidents we call “Outages”. Instead, we will have incidents with varying severity levels ranging from 1 to 5

  • The Major Incident process is invoked automatically anytime a severity 1 incident is started or a severity 2 incident exceeds our time-to-resolution target (4 hours).

  • Anyone who believes that we have a situation which warrants a major incident can trigger the process manually

  • An incident leader is assigned to coordinate the restoration of service and communications activities both among the team and with relevant stakeholders

  • “Outages” will no longer be automatically broadcast to tech-chat, tech-news, or myMiami, but instead rely on the incident leader to determine appropriate communication. Instead of a blemish, a major incident becomes an opportunity to let our Service Excellence shine!

Let us know what you think by commenting below.

Watch for more details on how to initiate this process and provide feedback next week.