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6 Steps to Service Outage Analysis
Oct 5, 2006
By

Hank Marquis





For each grouping of similar outages, examine the reasons for the duration of the unavailability. For example, the outage may have occurred because of faulty hardware or software, but the duration of the unavailability might have been extended by lack of tools, little or no training, unavailable spares, etc.

Remember to consider the “3 P’s” – people, product and process. Then review:

  • All existing procedures and policies used during the outage.
  • The actions and inactions of staff members, customers and anyone else involved in the outage or its restoration.
  • The management directives given to all involved during the before and during the outage.

    You must determine if anything might have lessened the duration of the outage, or better yet, avoided it altogether. Your examination of the “3 P’s” should locate a trend, a related cause, or at something in common with similar outages. This is the smoking gun.

    For example, a common cause might extend an outage may be a hierarchical escalation requirement that does not allow staff to proceed without management approval or a special tool is required and could not be found.

    The next step is to quantify the avoidable outage time. That is, if one hour of downtime resulted from trying to locate the proper tool, then the avoidable outage time is one hour times the number of outages so affected.

    Identifying the most preventable downtime is your goal. This is then the most significant generator of preventable downtime.

    End the SOA by creating a report summarizing the number of outages analyzed, timeframe, avoidable outage time, and the suggestions for improving or avoiding the outage. Prepare a request for change (RFC) and pass the entire kit on to change management.

    Hank Marquis is a managing partner and CTO at itSM Solutions. You can contact Hank at hank.marquis@itsmsolutions.com.

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