Let's Look At Some Specific Types of IT Operational Issues

‍

‍

What are some of the types of operational issues that an organization can face?

I will attempt to tie these issues to IT operations and our hotdog vendor example.

Let us begin with self-service ease of use. What does this mean? From an IT operations perspective, every organization provides its customers with the ability to take advantage of a self-service portal to help themselves. If this self-service portal has design issues, does not have clear and concise information, and is not intuitive in helping the customers use it effectively, it can lead to frustrations, complaints, and more calls to IT support, which becomes costlier. 

Let us take an example, imagine a client wants to request access to a shared folder. If there is no direct or easy way for the customer to do this, this can result in a poor client experience. If The customer has to navigate through several pages, go through several drop-down lists, fill out required fields which they do not understand, it can lead to issues.

How does this apply to our hotdog vendor example? Imagine your hotdog stand has your menu listed with other missing items, items that are no longer available for sale, items with no pricing information, or items with the wrong pricing information. How angry do you think the customers will be when they come up to place their order?

Let us take another example of an operational issue that can apply to IT and our hot dog stand. 

Let us take a look at issues with a lack of timely status updates. What does this mean? When a client calls IT support, IT support will either resolve the issue or route it to another team. If the issue is being routed to another team, this means that the customer has to wait. If the other team is not updating the ticket regarding what they're doing to resolve the issue promptly, the customer can feel like they are in a black hole. The more they wait without any updates, the more frustrated and angry they will become.

How does this apply to our hotdog stand?If a customer has placed an order for a foot-long hotdog with curly fries, and they were in line with multiple other customers, and they see other customers who are behind them getting their orders, but they have not been given their order, you can bet they are going to start wondering if they have been forgotten and they will escalate. It could be that their order is being worked on, it could be that the curly fries are not available, it could be that there was an issue with the burner that the foot-long hotdog was on, but if no one updates the customer, they will not know.

As You will see from this list, numerous operational issues touch both the IT world and the hot dog stand world. While this list is not comprehensive, it does touch on most of the common issues that operations teams typically face.