January 2013-Special

Posted by Carlyn Foshee Chatfield on January 14, 2013

Communications for Outages and other Unwelcome News

• • Rick Lesniak, SUNY University at Buffalo

  • Chuck Aikman, Indiana University

  • Debra Dexter, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

  • Alison Cruess, University of North Florida

  • Anjanette Sagona, University of Colorado at Boulder

  • Tina Meier, Oklahoma State University

A special International coffee shop on how IT divisions handle communications for outages and other unwelcome news, 2-3PM Central on Wednesday, January 23, 2013. Yes, it was recorded!.

Resources

• • Slides by Rick Lesniak and Anjanette Sagona, attached

  • Prezi by Alison Cruess

  • Oklahoma State's announcement site

  • Workflow for outage communications used at WPI (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), attached below

Chat Notes

• • Carlyn C- Rice: add questions for speakers to the chat

  • Carlyn C- Rice: use FULL SCREEN button, top right of your screen

  • Carlyn C- Rice: https://app.it.okstate.edu/itannounce/

  • Carlyn C- Rice: go to Tina's web site shown above, sorry I can't share my screen in current browser.

  • Karen - Miami U: How do you handle major outages during non-business hours? Example: email goes down on a holiday or Saturday.

  • Debbie - Moody: So, the SharePoint feed on the website is for internal communications?

  • Dawn - TCS Education System: Is it possible to make the diagram larger (hard to read).

  • Jennifer - Vanderbilt: Is the Incident Commander a technical resource with the service that is experiencing the unplanned outage?

  • Alison 2 - UNF: the SharePoint feed is for primarily for external users

  • Alison 2 - UNF: The IC is usually a director or asst.. director over the system or service that is affected.

  • Ellen-University of Minnesota: URL for Colorado Boulder OIT site?

  • Anjanette Sagona: http://www.colorado.edu/oit/

  • Ellen-University of Minnesota: thanks!

  • Lisa: Do staff get paid for responding to after hours outages?

  • Deb Dexter - WPI: http://www.wpi.edu/Admin/IT/News/servicenews.html

  • Tina @ Okstate: My exempt staff does not. My non-exempt does.

  • Omar Phillips - RIT: For planned outages, do you send communication as needed for each outage, or batch them together? (ex: here's what's happening this week..)

  • Ellen-University of Minnesota: what was the alternate word for user? I'm having trouble with this audio

  • Carlyn C- Rice: faculty, staff, or student.

  • Ellen-University of Minnesota: thanks,Carlyn

  • Chuck Aikman (Indiana): http://itnotices.iu.edu/

  • Carlyn C- Rice: Participant phone lines have been muted again, I will open them again for you to ask questions soon

  • Deb Dexter - WPI: @ Omar, we have grouped some outages for related systems

  • Deb Dexter - WPI: But we don't group them for the week.

  • Debbie - Moody: I'm here, but not using the phone for audio.

  • Carlyn C- Rice: I think a male voice was asking a question but it was very distant, feel free to type in your question if we didn't hear it

  • Shandon: How do you handle avoid overwhelming customers with information to the point that they ignore communications?

  • Carlyn C- Rice: How do you handle comms for change control vs major outage comms?

  • Greg: I see a question about pay for after-hours outage response. I work with AJ at CU-Boulder and since the communications team is overtime exempt, we do not get paid. But like AJ mentioned, we do re-balance the load if someone has had to take on a lot of after-hours communication.

  • Debbie - Moody: Rick, what applications did you use to create the outage templates?

  • Deb Dexter - WPI: We say "campus" sometimes or "community" instead of user

  • Carlyn C- Rice: what is everyone else replacing "user" with?

  • Deb Dexter - WPI: Many of the technical staff use "user" often

  • Chuck Aikman (Indiana): Ckients has been trendy lately

  • Alison Cruess - Univ. of North Fla: student, faculty, staff in that order

  • Sheri Thompson - LSU: we hace customers, campus, faculty/staff/students

  • Chuck Aikman (Indiana): Sorry, clients

  • Ellen Borkowski, Union College: Campus Community for everyone, or else targeted audiences if needed (faculty, student, staff)

  • Chuck Aikman (Indiana): Ditto on Alison's order - students first

  • Omar Phillips - RIT: student, faculty, staff (in that order)

  • Deb Dexter - WPI: Has anyone measured the reach to their audience? Any metrics?

  • Greg: Do others out there publish outage summaries after a service is restored and the root cause determined? If so, how do you determine which outages get summarized?

  • Shandon: at a previous institution we used to monitor hits to our notification site.

  • Chuck Aikman (Indiana): We update after resolved. More techncial details go to IT professional community

  • Carlyn C- Rice: How do you send out the early notification?

  • Debbie - Moody: We avoid needing to use "user," "customer," etcetera by the format of our message. We send out e-mails to different constituency groups, so each message is tailored to that group.

  • Deb Dexter - WPI: Does anyone use a cable channel? We have a cable channel played in our Campus Center.

  • Alison Cruess - Univ. of North Fla: we sometimes publish follow ups in campus email, but this is usually when we we were not able to keep folks updated during the interruption. When we send telephone broadcats, we always follow up with an "all-cleared" VM

  • Ellen Borkowski, Union College: I'm at a small institution with no one on my staff responsible for "communications" - what is your advice in terms of what to tackle first?

  • Greg: At CU-Boulder we definitely see measurable decrease in calls to the Service Center once we have issued Service Alerts or posted messages in the campus portal. In fact, the our service center knows to bring us into the loop if they are seeing a lot of calls about a problem so that we can prepare messaging; however, we first get confimation of the issue from our operations folks.

  • Deb Dexter - WPI: @ Ellen, we found developing that process map helps to visualize what you want the process to be, then you go from there.

  • Alison Cruess - Univ. of North Fla: Ellen, I would outline a plan on the process you would follow during a service interruption

  • Ellen Borkowski, Union College: thanks

  • Ellen Borkowski, Union College: They are talking more with each other since I arrived here as the new CIO two years ago.

  • Debbie - Moody: Carlyn, to the previous question you had in chat, we differentiate between change control and outage messages by the subject line of our message. If the message is about an outage or other mission critical information, it is an "ETS ALERT" and things that folks need to know but don't need to act on are "ETS COMMUNIQUES"

  • Alison Cruess - Univ. of North Fla: we use ifttt.com - if this then that - I can send get use various tools to get texts out to groups of people

  • Debbie - Moody: I just went to the iftt.com site -- it looks very interesting.

  • Dawn - TCS Education System: once per week

  • Sheri Thompson - LSU: We have Change Mgt

  • Omar Phillips - RIT: RIT only recently started a change board, meets once per week

  • Carlyn C- Rice: Rice has change control for 30 minutes, MWF afternoons

  • Ellen Borkowski, Union College: We do not have a formal Change Management process in place - sounds like I need to get one in place!

  • Alison Cruess - Univ. of North Fla: our change management is handled virtually

  • Debbie - Moody: We have change management teams for each application

  • Larry - Univ of Hawaii: The Change Management group at Univ of Hawaii meets bi-weekly.

  • Chuck Aikman (Indiana): We have formal Change Management weekly. The enterprise infrasturcture folks have a weekly meeting also, which then yields changes brought to the primary meeting.

  • Greg: CU-Boulder change management team meets once a week.

  • Sheri Thompson - LSU: Changes are submitted electronically via a secure WordPress site and then are listed on the calendar. We meet weekliy

  • Omar Phillips - RIT: Any concerns over creating a negative view of IT if "all we ever communicate is downtime"?

  • Debbie - Moody: Rick, what did you use to create your e-mail templates?

  • Dawn - TCS Education System: we don't get any pushback, but are a small organization

  • Chuck Aikman (Indiana): We have four types of notices 1) Alert (unplanned) 2) Maintenance (planned) 3) Announcement 4) Service News

  • Deb Dexter - WPI: Debbie - on our SharePoint site we use a Word template but Alison had a SharePoint list

  • Melanie Thomas - UTEP: We have a face to face every other week for 30 minutes and do regular updates the 3rd Thursday every month. Takes LOTS to get something done any other time.

  • Deb Dexter - WPI: WPI doesn't have a formal meeting but my role involves going out to people and talking to them on a regular basis.

  • Debbie - Moody: Our change management starts in SharePoinnt where we can put in change requests. We have periodic meetings where we discuss the proposed change and accept or reject it. But, also, we have the teams who work with each application who meet to discuss changes like known software updates.

  • Deb Dexter - WPI: Tina had an inventory of systems and the services impacted when there is an outage.

  • Chuck Aikman (Indiana): Sounds liek Change Management could be another coffee shop topic!

  • Carlyn C- Rice: yes!

  • Alison Cruess - Univ. of North Fla: agree

  • Deb Dexter - WPI: Thanks everyone!

  • Debbie - Moody: clap, clap, clap!!

  • Chuck Aikman (Indiana): Thanks everyone!

  • Ellen Borkowski, Union College: Thanks!

  • Dawn - TCS Education System: thank you everyone!

  • Omar Phillips - RIT: Thanks!

  • Karen - Miami U: Thanks! Good session!

  • Rick - SUNY U. Buffalo: Stay warm everyone!