Has your organization considered problem solving skills training for your IT staff?\u00a0 Maybe you should.\u00a0\u00a0 Here are 5 signs that your IT organization should invest in this critical set of skills:<\/p>\n
When the most critical systems that your employees, suppliers and customers depend on are down or not working properly, you have a Major Incident on your hands.\u00a0 This is the time when \u201call hands are on deck\u201d in the IT department and the top priority is restoring service as quickly as possible.\u00a0 What do these Major Incidents feel like in your organization?\u00a0 Are they structured and well-orchestrated, with each team member knowing the role they need to play, actions that need to be taken and information to be collected?\u00a0 Or do you have images of children playing soccer with everyone running around screaming and chasing the ball around the field but not really accomplishing anything?\u00a0 Problem solving training can help your IT organization be more effective and get better results from the experts on your team.<\/p>\n
How often do the resolution notes for system incidents read as a single line statement, such as \u201crebooted the system and issue went away\u201d?\u00a0 What caused the incident to happen?\u00a0 Will it happen again?\u00a0 If your IT staff is narrowly focused on restoring service to meet their availability SLAs and not understanding why the issue occurred or what was going on within the system and in the environment, you are at a high risk of whatever the issue was recurring in the future.\u00a0 Problem solving skills and a robust problem management process can help ensure that necessary data is captured to understand the underlying cause of the failure so preventative actions can be undertaken to avoid the situation from happening again.<\/p>\n
How large is your \u201cknown issues\u201d list becoming?\u00a0 Most incident management processes stop focusing on an issue once a short-term-fix and\/or work-around is identified and documented.\u00a0 Known issues can be a real problem for organizations if left unchecked \u2013 leading to a user perception of IT systems being unreliable and unstable.\u00a0 Problem solving skills and processes can help your IT organization turn your \u201cknown issues\u201d list into a \u201cnon-issue\u201d list.<\/p>\n
Production incidents represent flaws in a system that were not able to be anticipated, avoided, or identified through development and testing processes.\u00a0 They are often some of the most complex and difficult situations to diagnose and resolve, yet the responsibility of addressing them often falls to the most junior person in the organization.\u00a0 Effective problem solving is not an individual skill \u2013 it\u2019s a team effort and must be embedded into the culture of your IT organization.\u00a0 Problem solving training can help your IT organization understand who needs to be involved in the Incident and Problem Management processes- from your new-hire to the most senior subject matter expert.<\/p>\n
Most of the symptom and environmental data needed to diagnose a system problem and identify the underlying cause(s) is lost or destroyed when the service is restored.\u00a0 If the people responsible for problem management are not engaged until after the incident is resolved, the likelihood of truly understanding the problem and avoiding it in the future is reduced.\u00a0 Problem Solving skills and processes can help ensure that the right people are engaged at the right time and if they aren\u2019t available that others on the team know what data to capture so the problem can be analyzed later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Has your organization considered problem solving skills training for your IT staff?\u00a0 Maybe you should.\u00a0\u00a0 Here are 5 signs that your IT organization should invest in this critical set of skills: 1.\u00a0Major Incidents feel more like a group of toddlers playing soccer than a group of highly paid professionals executing as a team. When the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":430,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[124],"class_list":["post-25011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-other"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n