How To Improve Communication between IT and Other Departments :How To Improve Communication between IT and Other Departments


Agenda :Agenda Today ‘s Issues Communication Failures IT Employees Communication Methods How to inform departments How to schedule changes How deal with angry employees Q&A


Today’s Issues :Today’s Issues Network changes Lost user request Software upgrade issues (not everyone uses the same software such as word)


Communication Failures :Communication Failures When a change is going to be made the departments are not notified. When a problem arises people/departments affect are not notified. IT department talk down to employees. Request with lower priority never gets addressed. Changes are made with out testing them first.


Problem with Network changes :Problem with Network changes IT make changes to the network without any notice and all of a sudden the network applications stops working and they crash. When the network is back up and is running again – the user might have lost what they were working on. Having to go back and re-set the network permissions.


Communication Failures :Communication Failures Employees don’t trust IT department. Employees have a hard time Explain their problem to IT. Employees keep having the same problem since they don’t understand how the problem was fixed. Employees get angry when IT does not respond.


Lost Requests :Lost Requests The user sends emails to IT when they have requests IT does not respond to the email right away. IT might send out email with a request number. The user does not have any way of tracking the request. IT makes the decision what the priority of the request is. IT ignores the request, unless the department head (manger) gets involved. The user needs to keep reminding IT about their requests.


Method of CommunicationsInforming Departments :Method of CommunicationsInforming Departments Letting each department head know what servers belong to them. Check with the department heads about the server availability. Notify the department heads about changes coming up.


Methods of Communication schedule changes :Methods of Communication schedule changes Schedule changes Publish a schedule when changes are going to be made. The schedule can be published using SharePoint E-mail the users before the changes are made Major changes need to be made during off hours. When changes need to be made to the info structure let users know that they need to reboot the next day. Test the changes before making them


Methods of Communicationangry employees :Methods of Communicationangry employees Notify the employee when there are problems When e-mail is down post notifications. When changes fail. Create FAQ When fixing a problem explain how it was fixed.


Request Tracking :Request Tracking When a request has been send to IT, respond back. When the priority is set let the user know Allow the users to set the priority of their request, if the priority of the request is not correct notify the user. Give estimate when their request is going to be done Allow users to track their requests


Request Tracking :Request Tracking When e-mail/intranet is not available the user should be able to call in a problem and the IT should log it in and send the user a request number. After a request has been responded to, contact the user to validate that the problem has been resolved. Have a weekly audit of the requests If there are open requests, contact the user to see if the request still needs to be open or if it can be closed.


Software standards :Software standards Problem Not every user has the same set of software i.e. different versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Internet Explorer, Adobe Acrobat Reader. IT has to support different version of the software The users are not able to share document easily. The document created with the new version of software may not be compatible with other versions.


Software Standards :Software Standards Allowing all users to have the same version of software it makes it easy for everyone to share their document. IT will only have to support one version of the software.


Q&A :Q&A