Service Desk Notice Template (Need Advice)

[tmack]

What I'm trying to do is see if I can get some feedback and/or examples of what others use when communicating out from the service desk to the organization (specifically process/function owners and major stakeholders) that there has been an outage of some kind and that outages' effect to services.

This is only one constructed right now. The goal is to be used when the event initially occurs and service desk is aware, and then another to report services are back to normal operation and the last to be the RCA details.

What do others do? Is this over/under communication? Any feedback is welcomed.

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SERVICE DESK EVENT
SERVICE USER INITIAL NOTIFICATION

Date of Notification: xx/xx/xxxx

Services Description of Event:
Service Desk Services were impacted due to power loss at headquarters.


Impact:
Incident Recording (or Phone Answering): From xx xM EST until xx PM EST some calls were directed to voice mail.
Incident Management Tool: The tool was inaccessible from approx xx PM EST until xx xM EST.


Outage Occurred: xx/xx/xxxx xx xM EST
Outage Resolved: xx/xx/xxxx xx xM EST

[UKVIKING]

There is no standard

what ever you like you can do

In itil, it is your call or what ever your documentation says

NOTE: there are examples in the V2 blue book
_________________
John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

Change Management is POWER & CONTROL. /....evil laughter

[Diarmid]

tmack,

you really need to start with being clear about what you want to achieve with the notification - reassurance, demystification, "open and honest", reinforcing value of your service, etc. Then you need to know enough about your customers and users to design effective format and content.

Irrespective, I wouldn't think that "Incident Management Tool: The tool was inaccessible from..." is something you would say to users and customers. It made me think you were be talking about internal communication until I checked that you had "SERVICE USER INITIAL NOTIFICATION" at the top. Apart from being jargony [no such word; try jargonic, jargonful, gobbledygook] and techie, it is not a user impact and so it just sounds like an excuse.
_________________
"Method goes far to prevent trouble in business: for it makes the task easy, hinders confusion, saves abundance of time, and instructs those that have business depending, both what to do and what to hope."
William Penn 1644-1718

[tmack]

Diarmid

Some of the most valuable feedback I've gotten through a forum, thank you. Ive got to process the comments before I respond though...

Again exactly what I was looking for, thanks.

[iggy]

An example of notification in my organization

[UKVIKING]

iggy

There is also the larger issue of notification spam -

ie too much information about issues / outages /etc that is sent to all users

this would make the users feel your service is crap

The example below....

what does that mean to a non technical person or a business person

The term deadlock is a DBA term.

What does that mean to the people who are users of the SAP WCP system

If they are tech savvy.. they would go oooh.. deadlock.. that makes sense.. why is it deadlock

For Business users - who your announcement should be focused on

the application - blah - is suffering a database related issue. This impact on the following modules - blah - where the process - blah can not be completed

The workaround is to do blah

The solution for this is being developed and implemented as ....

for example means more than ..

You almost have to be like a reporter... reporting the news

News bulletin

Some thing happened in town today causing major traffic jams
_________________
John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

Change Management is POWER & CONTROL. /....evil laughter

[iggy]

In a sense you're absolutely right however that depends on how technical your end user community is. If your end users do work with SAP on daily basis, then some technical jargon is well known to them. Non-techie people simply do not work with such advanced application as SAP is. Even if there are some individuals who have some problems to interprete technical description, there is always someone next to them who will explain the nature of provided solution. Nevertheless I do agree that "Deadlock in DBA...." is totally not understandable for standard user who may feel bit in a dark when being delivered such information.
_________________
Foundation Certificate in IT Service Management - Green Badge

[UKVIKING]

Yes

true

You have to know your audience and their spam / specious notification level

One way is to send very general notices to general users

and a detailed to key it guru types
_________________
John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

Change Management is POWER & CONTROL. /....evil laughter

[BorisBear]