The Wi-Fi that kept dropping
Every Tuesday morning the college Wi-Fi drops for five minutes. Each week a technician reboots a box and closes the ticket.
After six weeks, someone asks: why does it happen every Tuesday? Nobody had looked for the cause. They had only fixed the symptom.
Key words
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Service transition | building a service and putting it live, with changes managed together |
| Service operation | running the service day to day |
| Continual service improvement | always looking for ways to make a service better |
| Incident | something that has broken or slowed a service |
| Request | a person asking for something, such as a new account |
| Problem | the hidden cause behind incidents that keep coming back |
| Release | a set of changes put into the live system together |
| Routine task | a job done on a schedule, such as checking the backups |
The cells students fill in are left blank in this preview.
By the end of this lesson
Note
I can explain service transition, service operation and continual service improvement, and tell a request from an incident and a problem.
Starter
Have a go
Starter
3 questionsYour answers are marked here and are not kept. A college account keeps every student’s marks.
Stage 3: service transition
Service transition builds the service and moves it into the live system.
The key idea is that changes are managed in a coordinated way. Nobody changes things alone. A release puts planned changes in together. Each change is tested, approved and written down.
This stops one team undoing the work of another.
Stage 4: service operation
Service operation is the day-to-day running. It has four jobs.
- Fulfil requests, such as a new account.
- Resolve failures, which are incidents.
- Fix the hidden cause of repeats, which are problems.
- Do routine tasks, such as checking backups.
Request, incident and problem
| Kind | What it is | Example | Aim |
|---|---|---|---|
| Request | Asking for something new | A teacher wants a new shared folder | Deliver it |
| Incident | Something has broken or slowed | The printer is jammed | Get working again fast |
| Problem | The cause behind repeat incidents | Wi-Fi drops every Tuesday | Find and remove the cause |
| Routine task | Planned regular work | Weekly check of the backups | Keep things healthy |
The cells students fill in are left blank in this preview.
Stage 5: continual improvement
Continual service improvement means always asking: can this be better? More effective means it gives better results. More efficient means it uses less time or money.
It uses data: ticket counts, response times and user feedback. What it learns feeds back into strategy, and the cycle starts again.