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IT Service Availability

The secret to ensuring a superior level of service availability rests in three basic skills:

1. SRA – Service Recovery Analysis – the ability to recover a service disruption quickly and accurately.
2. TCA – Technical Cause Analysis – the ability to identify, investigate and fix the technical reason that caused the incident.
3. RCA – Root Cause Analysis – the ability to investigate and determine the correct root cause... and then to solve it in such a way that it does not have any chance of recurring.

These three approaches are each separate but interrelated entities. Their inter-relationship is based upon using the information collected in all three approaches.

The first attempt when encountering an incident is to find a way to minimize the effects and damage it is creating. The team needs to quickly identify the scope of the service disruption, making sure they collect all the factual information regarding the incident in terms of what is happening, where it is happening, when is it happening and what is unique about this disruption, if anything. They will need a common approach and tools to determine agreed action(s) for maximum support from all the stakeholders. This will ensure the rapid implementation of action(s) supported by all. (Service Recovery Analysis)

Once the incident and the service disruption are contained, they need to find why this incident happened. In other words, they need to find the technical reason why this disruption occurred. At this point, they will rely on accurate, specific and factual information gathered from various information sources to create an accurate snapshot of the incident. Using SME inputs, they will then generate possible causes and test all of them against the snapshot to determine the true cause. This will indicate the technical reason which should then be eliminated or corrected to remove the driver of the incident. (Technical Cause Analysis)

The last part of the process is to make sure this incident does not happen again. Now the team would perform a root cause analysis to identify the appropriate systemic or people reason(s) why this incident happened in the first place. This is a systematic evaluation of all the possible causes that could have had an impact on this situation. The team will re-use some of the factual information used in the TCA approach and will now elevate this to a search for root cause. Ultimately, they will also use a solution finding process to come up with the most effective corrective action(s) for the situation. (Root Cause Analysis)

So, what is so unique about the KEPNERandFOURIE™ approaches when compared to others? We advocate a team THINKING APPROACH utilizing DIVERGENT and CONVERGENT thinking. This thinking approach provides a common basis and process to be followed for gathering factual information and using SME's intuition to generate possible answers. It is all based upon specificity and asking the right questions from the right information sources at the right time. Divergent Thinking provides the guidelines and process for interrogative questioning while Convergent Thinking provides the vehicle for SME's to formulate their theories and test them against the factual information gathered.

How is it done? 

The way to do this is to equip the IT staff members with sufficient skills to continually apply as part of their normal workday.  It is preferable for the incident or problem to be addressed and resolved as close as possible to the source.

The practice of using the KEPNERandFOURIE™ skills is underpinned by a certain level of skills transfer to key staff, SME's and in-house facilitators, coupled with pre-agreed metrics and rules of engagement with built-in triggers for when to use the skills learned.

Ultimately, management will need to include the use of these skills in the staff member's performance management contract.