The move to working from home which started week beginning 16th of March 2020 had direct impact on service usage as well as on support calls. Collaboration tools such as Teams had. dramatic usage increase and there have been changes in support calls. While there have been somewhat less generic support calls, calls for supporting from home has increased. The following graphs shows data for services owned and supported by Applications Directorate.
Availability and performance
Looking at the unplanned availability data only one of the 21 priority services Applications Directorate support, did not meet the target:
https://dashboard.apps.is.ed.ac.uk/reports/availability/12/u/
Details from our site24x7 monitoring has shown no change in response times for services across almost 50 monitored services.
Active calls in Production Management (3rd line calls)
Looking at the total number of active calls within Production Management over the last eight weeks, we can see a slight increase of active calls over the first two weeks of working from home, and then in the 3rd week calls going down to normal levels, There is a slight trend that application related calls have recovered faster, but some of the infrastructure related calls are taking a bit longer as these have been quite a few and some complex to address new ways of working.
Calls in Service Management (2nd line)
Service Management Support Team experienced a significant drop in service calls (Incident/Service Request) across the initial work from home period. The backlog that has been rolling on for a significant amount of time is close to being completely clear. This allowed a significant increase in effort to address current Problems and Known Errors – notably within IDM, VRS, O365 and UniDesk. Background operational tasks have also increased allowing scoping of enhancement/improvement work, training and internal/user-facing documentation being improved. The extra time available has also allowed various new working procedures to be put in place that puts more improvements into our customer service practices. Furthermore our senior support experience has also allowed us to assist frontline teams such as IS Helpline more closely and proactively assist with retrieving calls which would be coming us thus expediting customer support.
Weeks spanning the initial WfH period for Service Calls
Weeks spanning the initial WfH period for Problem and Known Error activity
Mobile Phones
When Work from Home procedures were being invoked a bulk order of mobile phones were purchased for distribution amongst staff. 100 devices were procured and delivered within a few working days despite supply chains being under strain. Mobile devices continue to be in short supply, especially mobile broadband devices.
Usage of Teams
The usage of Teams since the working from home has seen a dramatic increase across all aspects of TEAMS usage. The following graphs with data since January 2020, show this clearly.
Messaging
Meetings/Calls
