Communicate your changes

If you make significant and/or major changes to a service that underpins other services then it is always a good idea to communicate, especially with the relevant Service Owners and the Service Desk and CRS teams.

With this in mind, the Service Process team recommend that change owners send a short email to the NUIT-All mailing list in advance of implementing a significant or major change that carries the risk of other services suffering impact in the event that the change fails, allowing sufficient time for people to mitigate those risks.

NUIT-All is the most appropriate mailing list since it will reach all service owners, or in their absence a deputy and also reach the first-line service teams.

It is a good idea to standardise the subject line of your email by using the pre-fix “Change Notification: ” – this will facilitate quick identification of such messages for those interested yet also provide a common attribute for those that wish to filter out these messages by setting an appropriate Outlook rule.

Within your email, as well as including the change ticket reference, a brief summary of the change and the date and time of planned implementation, you could consider whether it is also appropriate to say: ‘while it is not anticipated that there will be any interruption to named services, they should be considered at risk during the stated period.’

Finally, please also consider whether there should be outward communications about your planned change (i.e. to customers) – if so, please log a SAMM* request to the IT Service Desk.

Please note that this email notification suggestion is in addition to an appropriate communication plan constructed by the change owner and/or those involved in the change.

*A SAMM is an IT Service Desk news headline that displays on the IT Service website: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/itservice/news/

NU Service – Ticket history

With regards to the lack of visibility of the history of a ticket in NU Service. The Service Process team agreed that implementing a solution to this issue would be a priority in our next development cycle.

Our investigations identified feasible (albeit complex) configuration options that would work towards an improvement. However, the system provider contacted us last week in response to the concerns we expressed over such an important aspect being difficult to achieve.

We have been assured that one focus of the next version being released later this year is the History pane itself. This would improve two aspects of the system:

1. Providing the required visibility of the history of a ticket and
2. Improve the History pane that is hard coded in the system which adds little value as it currently exists.

With this in mind, we are going to postpone the configuration options that we were considering and instead feed in to the system provider’s initiative in the hopes that a robust solution can be designed and offered to us through an upgrade later this year.

NU Service – Release

We are hoping to do a release on 12th August to provide some system fixes and introduce some improvements.
The contents of this release will be light due to timescales since we need to ensure that the downtime is scheduled before the change freeze over registration period etc.
This release will also give relevant team members exposure to our development and release process; thanks to John (our new Service Process team member) and Adam (from App support who is taking over from Steve).