educational reliability

[interele]

For want of a better place to post this... I was wondering

if other schools have reliability targets for systems. i.e. percent

uptime of the core systems, number of failed PC's etc and

if so what do people expect ?

 

Ta

 

M

[garethEds]

If it works - the staff should count themselves lucky. We will do what we can with a reduced budget and some spit and sellotape :-)

 

If it's not working - well there we go. We will do our best to get it fixed as soon as we can or when the budget allows.

 

We do not produce an SLA for staff or pupils. Despite being a teacher - I often find other teachers have unrealistic expectations when they compare a domain joined PC to their home PC.

 

Gareth

[Oaktech]

Pretty much everything we do is best effort.

 

I've had 20 hours of file server outage in 16 months due to a failed drive. There have been a couple of weekends where the remote access hasn't worked. This is pretty typical of school IT I've found.

[localzuk]

We used to have some SLAs here, between the team and the SMT. However, since my team was reduced to just me? Those have gone out the window and I provide "best effort". There's only so much one person can do with a limited budget!

[psydii]

"Is it on fire?" No, then join the back of the queue. Everything is best effort, and logged in the Service Desk for monitoring and reporting purpsoses.

 

The expectation is classroom teaching tech gets priority over everything not on fire. New Software has a 'six week' lead time for deployment. Often can be done in a couple of days, sometimes in minutes. New stuff that costs money gets done shortly after a budget holder signs it off. Broken stuff gets fixed until I run out of maintenance budget. It is expected that we have spares for all consumables, and where ever possible we out-source repair and maintenance of hardware, servers core switches are on 24/7, structured cabling is on 12 working hours, projector and laptop repairs are on 1-2week RTB, but spares are on site to give the illusion of a 15 minutes SLA for the end user. We scrapped formal SLAs when we came out of a managed service, in favour of managed expectations. We report against these pseudo SLAs to the Head and Governors.

 

Today:

 

"Is it on fire?" Erm.. yes.

 

We had 15 minutes downtime because of a (smokey) failure in both UPSs that were supposed to be protecting the core switch chassis.

[forkies]

As seems to be the norm, we have no target. However I have had a 3 day whole network downtime scheduled into summer holidays each year so I can do essential server maintenance. No downtime other then that for a year (that ultimately is down to me to fix, I.E. Not power cuts).

 

I always say if it's not in the help desk it won't get done as I will forget about it (or don't even know about it). I was quite pleased this morning in staff briefing that the senior leadership, without any request from myself, told staff to put IT issues in the help desk, not to stop me in the hallway or email me or my technician directly. That seems to work well, help desk is getting more use today and I am able to get jobs done uninterrupted! Bonus.

[garethEds]

All problems are logged on the helpdesk and they are then prioritized.

If they don't like it they can come and see me but those that know me accept that's how it is and like it or lump it.

 

I don't think our school is big enough for a helpdesk - but I do like the idea of having one. I'm sure @rich_tech would use one - but with small staff and a small site I cannot see the point.

 

Gareth

[timbo343]

I don't think our school is big enough for a helpdesk - but I do like the idea of having one. I'm sure @rich_tech would use one - but with small staff and a small site I cannot see the point.

 

Gareth

 

How big is the school? I didnt think we would benefit but its been great and spiceworks is used in other places - catering and site team.

Edited October 5, 2015 by timbo343

[MrFrostmaul]

As seems to be the norm, we have no target. However I have had a 3 day whole network downtime scheduled into summer holidays each year so I can do essential server maintenance. No downtime other then that for a year (that ultimately is down to me to fix, I.E. Not power cuts).

 

I always say if it's not in the help desk it won't get done as I will forget about it (or don't even know about it). I was quite pleased this morning in staff briefing that the senior leadership, without any request from myself, told staff to put IT issues in the help desk, not to stop me in the hallway or email me or my technician directly. That seems to work well, help desk is getting more use today and I am able to get jobs done uninterrupted! Bonus.

 

It's lovely when they follow the Helpdesk reporting

[timbo343]

We started off having just our jobs ours until we found that we were just creating too much work for us so we opened it out to staff where they could record their own jobs. We used to have an email address, infact we still do, but we found that emails we just too arkward.

 

We now use it for all jobs and little things like projectors left on and see if there are occurances, see how many pupils come to us and ask for their print limitations to be altered, booking resources and with it been central we all can look at it. I sometimes think its a mind frame change. My category list is huge, well i think it is anyway.

[Davit2005]

"Is it on fire?" No, then join the back of the queue.

 

You would think things are on fire here the way some people react.

 

i.e. A few members of SMT found 2 links to documents broke on the website due to a member of marketing mucking up the HyperLinks. It was like the whole world was going to end, really, come on .

[rich_tech]

I have been looking at Helpdesk's recently again in work, primarily my motivation was to give staff the option for an email address and access to a ticketing system - i.e. helpdesk@school to log faults, we are hovering about 800+ kids at the moment and 60+ staff. Though I think we are a little small to be rolling it out with our staff.

 

I have been looking at and used helpdesks in the past, I used spiceworks for a couple of terms to basically monitor how much support some departments were demanding (Gareth knows as I do, that some departments here are a lot more vocal and demanding on the support issues and I wanted to keep tabs on the time they were taking up)

 

I used to use spiceworks, but recently discovered it seems to be clogging the network and driving up the CPU on our core switching, even with all scans turned off here, which isn't ideal in any way and I find that I don't trust it all that much to do as its told.

 

I have since looked at ManageEngine ServiceDesk+, which has superior features as it is a more specific helpdesk product and it works with AD integration out of the box with minimal faff which I had with Spiceworks, though it takes a bit more time to setup as it is an all singing all dancing helpdesk compared to the simpler spiceworks offering.

[rich_tech]

You would think things are on fire here the way some people react.

 

i.e. A few members of SMT found 2 links to documents broke on the website due to a member of marketing mucking up the HyperLinks. It was like the whole world was going to end, really, come on .

 

Its always suprising how the normally unflappable people flap when something trivial happens I find, I have had ridiculous issues about email access and emails not sending over the years, to go along and change a , to a . in an address or restart outlook, makes me realise - Email = Serious Business

[pete]

I don't think our school is big enough for a helpdesk - but I do like the idea of having one. I'm sure @rich_tech would use one - but with small staff and a small site I cannot see the point.

 

Gareth

 

It gets it out of your inbox and into a structured journal-per-job to which you can attach notes, links to KB articles, screenshots etc. Assuming you picked something with half-decent search you can then search for the thing you fixed six months ago for Bob but can't remember now Sue's having the same problem.

 

Think less "allocating and prioritising jobs" and more "writing stuff down properly". If you're creating jobs from email it's even easier (though you'll have to rewrite the subject lines of tickets to make them sane).

Edited October 6, 2015 by pete

[timbo343]

I have been looking at Helpdesk's recently again in work, primarily my motivation was to give staff the option for an email address and access to a ticketing system - i.e. helpdesk@school to log faults, we are hovering about 800+ kids at the moment and 60+ staff. Though I think we are a little small to be rolling it out with our staff.

 

I have been looking at and used helpdesks in the past, I used spiceworks for a couple of terms to basically monitor how much support some departments were demanding (Gareth knows as I do, that some departments here are a lot more vocal and demanding on the support issues and I wanted to keep tabs on the time they were taking up)

 

I used to use spiceworks, but recently discovered it seems to be clogging the network and driving up the CPU on our core switching, even with all scans turned off here, which isn't ideal in any way and I find that I don't trust it all that much to do as its told.

 

I have since looked at ManageEngine ServiceDesk+, which has superior features as it is a more specific helpdesk product and it works with AD integration out of the box with minimal faff which I had with Spiceworks, though it takes a bit more time to setup as it is an all singing all dancing helpdesk compared to the simpler spiceworks offering.

 

I dont think you can be tok small to have a helpdesk. Like others have said, it a place where you jobs are and it means you dont get interrupted if you are on with something.

 

We only have 750 students and around 60 teaching staff with possibly 40 support staff. For us its great!

 

This morning someone was flapping about a black toner on one of the MFDs, if they had created a ticket it would have got sorted, instead they emailed 2 out of the 3 of us, who were out doing a jobs but the third would have picked it up.

[rich_tech]

I think the issue we would have is getting people to report stuff full stop at times, but thats with every school I think, it is under development with me and in fairness ManageEngine has made it easier with one or two click reporting being the option for any normal faults.