What 3 methods can help identify information technology problems?

Explanation:

Every IT organization has processes for managing incidents and problems. Often these are based on ideas from ITIL, the world’s leading best practice for IT service management. According to ITIL, an incident is “An unplanned interruption to an IT service or reduction in the quality of an IT service…” and a problem is “A cause of one or more incidents….” The incident management process helps to restore normal service, and the problem management process helps to reduce the impact of future incidents.

Incident and problem management processes define the steps people should take to manage and resolve issues, and they nearly always have a box labelled “Investigation and Diagnosis” (or something very similar) where something magical is supposed to happen.

For the people whose job it is to fix things when they go wrong, the most important activities are diagnosing the issue, and working out how to fix it. Of course, they have to do all the other things in the process, like update records and notify users when they have a resolution, but most of their time is spent doing “Investigation and Diagnosis.”

When we train service desk staff and support staff, we often send them on technical training courses, to make sure that they understand the technology they are working on, and we also send them on ITIL courses (or other best practice training), to make sure they understand how the process should work and how it fits with other IT activities. But we very rarely actually teach people how to investigate and diagnose incidents and problems. We often don’t even provide mentoring to help them develop troubleshooting skills. We assume they will just know how to do this. This is a great pity. Inexperienced staff will very probably have no idea how to approach investigation and diagnosis, and nor will many otherwise very knowledgeable people.

So, if you diagnose incidents and problems, or manage people who do, then I’m here to let you know that there are specific approaches available that will be of use to you. You should learn them and be able to use them when appropriate. Here are some that I have found particularly helpful, though the list is not exhaustive.