How-To Resolve IT Problems on IT Department

You just landed in a new IT Department, promoted to a senior position or you just cannot run behind fires anymore and decide to act. We will give some practical advice on how to structure a plan for identifying the IT problems as well as handling and resolving them.

resolve it problems

The Information Gathering Phase.

Accumulate the Problems.

The Ideal scenario will be to have a ticketing system in place. We know though most companies are keeping IT requests only on email. Outlook offers some impressive filtering & searching capabilities too for this task.  You will have to categorize and group the repetitive issues that kill your productivity and reputation. We highly recommend creating an excel report with them with information on how often those IT problems are happening, how much downtime they are causing, and what department affecting them. This is easily presentable to the management, plus it leaves no room for misinterpretation of the importance to act towards resolving them.

Inventory the Assets.

All IT assets (servers, switches, printers, storage, UPS internet lines, etc.) should be documented on an inventorying file or platform (followed by all related information). Some mandatory fields are Manufacturer/Model, Serial Number, Location, IP, Admin URL, Warranty Expiration, Credentials.

Create an IT Business Map.

This is the most time-consuming step of all, but it will help minimize the time needed for identification and fix actions later. Create a communications and business processes map that is bound to IT Systems. This will enable you easily to match reported issues with what fails at where anytime. Visio is your best friend here as you can include a full diagram that also contains detailed data for each object. Alternative free solutions OpenOffice Draw or Diagrams.net.

The Resolution Phase.

Assess the Costs.

Start by checking the existing warranty of the assets as many might already have including remediation services. Estimate the cost of the upgrades or equipment replacements you need. Estimate the cost of the external services that might be needed.

Discuss with the Team.

Present all the information gathered linked with the issues to the rest of the Team as also to the Management. Decide based on the problems If you have the resources needed internally or if you will need external expert help on specific technologies.

Make the IT Problems Action Plan.

Create an action plan categorized into Critical and Optimization changes. First, handle all the repetitive issues that cause downtime or general business disruption. By stabilizing the environment, you can now focus on Optimization changes. Continue with the structural changes that will improve the overall experience for everyone.

Monitoring IT Systems.

We cannot stress enough the importance of having an IT monitoring system correctly setup in place. This will ensure that you will maintain the good health of the environment by remaining aware of any potential issues in the future.  We have an article where you can see how to monitor your servers.

If the above sounds confusing, very technical, or just time consuming for you current capacity, we are here to help Contact us by Clicking Here. We are helping businesses to stabilizing and optimizing their environments. We also offer monitoring as a service if you just want us to keep an eye and alert you if something has indications of the will stop working soon. Here is an article related to monitoring

IT-Emergencies Team