As many of you will be aware, we have made efforts over the last 8 months to improve the way we deal with system outages and failures. All follow-up actions have been recorded on SharePoint and managed by the Service Management Team, the effect being that more of these actions have been seen through to completion.
With the recent outage of the Banner system, Tim Sewell used ServiceNow to create a set of Tasks attached to the associated Problem ticket. Using the ITSM system allowed us to have better visibility of the ownership and completion of the Major Incident Review follow-up actions. The actions/tasks were fed into the now familiar My Work queues, and formed part of the out of the box reporting within ServiceNow.
Just to be clear, it has been Tim and his team’s efforts in completing the work that have lead to a more stable system/service. The use of ServiceNow helped coordinate efforts and understand when work had been successfully completed.
From now on, we will use ServiceNow to log and manage corrective actions as Problem Tasks, which will be assigned to the correct teams and individuals – some of you may have outstanding actions from previous reviews – Graham Morgan will contact you with follow-up emails regarding these.
This innovation forms part of a larger body of work which is being undertaken by the Service Management Team encompassing restarts, outages and problem management – all of which will need to be in place if we are to start pulling together the data to understand Service Availability.