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Let me tell you a narrative in the iT world

Turn up Monday morning and nothing working?
– Login’s
– PC not turning on
— PC not right after patching/update
– Keycard not scanning
– Coffee machine not working
Etc

What I mentioned above is a regular occurrence in the IT space. Now put your tech hat on and have a think about what happens during an outage or major IT issue.
Now you have a bit more to deal with.

Tech systems (/stacks (I may refer to a system as a stack time to time)) rely on a few things

• Attention and pro-activeness
• Awareness
• Knowledge (and skills (for the troubleshooting side))
• People (who has the knowledge as well)
• Processes
  • Escalations
• Root cause and resolution
• Review / Retro

These few things are probably the most important items to have on your IT toolbox. Yet there is little time and thought on how to apply these during incidents and issues.

During my time in IT these items above have always lacked across many peers. The core/principle knowledge of how apps, websites, programs work isn’t the issue, but the things around it. E.g. The connections to and from, external systems and stacks, unknown users, edge cases, one off scenarios etc

The next time there is a major issue have a think about of the following

• Attention and pro-activeness
  • Was anyone (or I) aware of the issue to begin with?
  • Did anyone (or I) see anything that may have lead to this issue
• Awareness
  • Did this issue happen before (aware), but no one did anything about it the first time?
• Knowledge (and skills (for the troubleshooting side))
  • What are the specifics that I need to know about these systems
  • What are the top core features and functions that is a must know
  • Is this knowledge complete?
    • Monitoring
    • Alerting
    • Charts, graphs and dashboards
    • Automated phone calls?
• People (who has the knowledge as well)
  • The who’s who of knowledge. Who are they and what do they do
    • This might also include yourself
• Processes
  • Escalations
    • Notifications
    • Phone numbers and emails
    • Specific details and steps on how to get to the resolution
• Root cause and resolution
• Review / Retro
  • Will anyone learn from this or it will be put into the resolve pile and be forgotten about?

The moral of this tech story is, not everyone will know all of this end to end. If it’s not up to others, then who is it up to?

Summary:

• The world of IT history repeats itself
• (What will you want to do about it)