This release focuses on fixing a few issues that have impacted the performance of NU Service, following some time spent performing a healthcheck of the system.

Some of the changes are in the background processes, however there are a few modifications to processes and queries to be aware of.

Change Management

Change: We have altered the way that appointments are handled within the Change Management process. Analysts should add appointments to the Change Calendar as normal, but following this if needed there is a new action available at both the ‘Open’ and ‘Approved’ status, called ‘Delete Appointment’. This is to be used either to simply remove the appointment from the change calendar, or to modify the timings (to modify the timings of an appointment, simply delete the appointment then re-create it with the correct timings).

NOTE: Deleting an appointment when a change is in an ‘Approved’ state will take the change back to ‘Open’, and approval will have to be sought again.

Change Calendar

Fix: A modification has been made to the Change Calendar, meaning that entries will not appear to be duplicating.

Fix: The Calendar gadget on the ‘Active Changes’ dashboard will now populate correctly when the dashboard loads.

Queries

Change: Following advice from a LANDESK consultant, we have removed the ability to search by ‘Details’ or ‘Description’ from the following ticket search queries:

• Search All Tickets
• Search All Incidents (previously Incident Search)
• Search All Requests (previously Service Request Search)
• Search All Changes (previously Change Search)
• Search All Problems (previously Problem Search)

Ticket History

Change: We have enabled line formatting in certain entries in the Incident and Request Ticket Histories, content will now correctly include line breaks.

NU Service will be unavailable on Monday 7th November between 17:00 and 20:00 for the purpose of planned system maintenance.

Please ensure that you are logged out of the system during this time period.

UPDATE:

The release below did not go ahead, and has been rescheduled for Thursday 27th October 2016, from 17:00 – 20:00.

ORIGINAL POST:

NU Service will be unavailable on Tuesday 25th October between 17:00 and 20:00 for the purpose of planned system maintenance.

Please ensure that you are logged out of the system during this time period.

Major Incident process

Following consultation and process amendments, the NU Service process for Major IT Incidents has now changed:

1. In order to declare a Major Incident, the original ticket must be ‘Significant’, meaning it must have a priority of either 1 or 2.

2. ‘Significant’ incidents will be marked as such using the banner above the ‘details’ field of the ticket.

3. When an incident is declared Major, additional fields will appear above the ‘details’ field to show the current Incident and Communications leads – these are not mandatory and can be changed at any point during the tickets lifecycle. These fields use a search query in the same way that the ‘raise user’ filed does; simply start typing a name and the relevant results will be displayed.

4. An additional checkbox has been added to the ‘note’ action, titled ‘Is Timeline Event?’ Going forwards, it is hoped that this checkbox is selected whenever a note pertinent to an MI is added to a ticket. There has been an additional query added to the ‘NUIT Analysts’ shortcut bar in NU Service called ‘Major Incident Timeline’, which will allow all notes from a specific incident to be gathered and exported.

5. When a Major Incident is resolved, it will now go to a separate holding state titled ‘Pending MI Review’. The ticket will be automatically assigned to the Service Process team at this point.

Known issue

Attempting to select ‘Assign To My Group Instead Of Suggested Group’ or ‘Assign To Me’ when creating a new Incident ticket without having first selected the ‘Impact’ and ‘Urgency’ will cause an error message to appear at the top of the screen. This does not prevent the selected action from occurring.

Change Management

The ‘XML (1,1)’ error has been fixed.

Miscellaneous additions

A ‘Response Level’ field has been added to Triage – Incident, in order to allow analysts to see the Priority of an incident before it is raised – this will allow analysts to better prepare for Significant or Major Incident.