Have you ever worked at an IT helpdesk? If so you might be familiar with the methodology generally used in the troubleshooting process and definitively you are already an expert at dealing with the (affected) user provided details (or better said lack of details). In any case this process boils down to 4 steps…
- Define the problem: Here we contact the user confirming and adding details to the problem he is experiencing. Usually users states a vey simple description of their problems that goes like “Internet is not working”, but upon further inspection he actually meant that an specific app (say email) is not working or something among these lines. Thus it is critical to always get in touch with the user, and do it soon as memory do degrades over time, to review their problem and translate it to meaningful information so that anybody could read it, get an idea about the issue and start a troubleshooting process. You will see that this step is critical, specially when it is time to define the scope of the problem.
- Isolate the network layer: This one refers specifically to the 7 layers on the OSI model (Physical, Data Link, Network, Transport, Session, Presentation and Application) and thus merits a more technical approach better served on a post of it’s own but it serves the purpose of identifying where might the problem resides and definitively will get us closer to the cause and the possible solution.
- Isolate the scope: Well you need to understand the WHO or WHAT and WHEN, these are the dimensions of the issue. Typically you’ll want to know how many users are affected and since when is the problem occurring in addition to if it is and intermittent or persistent issue. Armed with this information you can better prioritize your resources to solve this problem and get a much better understanding of the situation keeping in mind that generally the fresher the problem is, the easier it is to solve. Old (and frequently almost forgotten) problems tend to be a tad more difficult to resolve as invariably people tend to forget details about it and root cause might be hidden deeply.
- Isolate the cause: With the previous steps completed you should be in a position where you know where the root cause might be located (although you might not know yet the root cause and its solution) and it may be possible for you to provide an educated guess on what might be causing the issue or otherwise engage with and upper support tier to assist on the problem resolution.
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