University of NSW Communication Services OutofHours Support

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University of NSWCommunication
ServicesOut-of-Hours Support
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Description of IT at UNSW

• Like many other large organizations, UNSW has
  oscillated between a centralised and distributed
  support model.
• At the moment we have a hybrid model with support
  for centralized services and infrastructure as
  well as local faculty support (that report to the
  CIO) for school- or faculty-level desktops and
  applications etc.

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Servicedesk

• One number / single point of contact for IT
  support
• Normal Phone and Email Support hours are 8AM to
  8PM weekdays.
• There is a skeleton crew of (student) casuals
  after hours. Users are directed to the
  Servicedesk managers mobile if no staff are
  available.

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Communications Services

• Our group looks after all aspects of the voice
  and data network infrastructure
• Given that the voice and data networks are
  critical infrastructure, our team is required to
  also provide limited out-of-hours support

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Out of Hours SupportThe Old Way

• In the past, this was done in a fairly ad-hoc
  manner the Servicedesk would call the Comms
  manager who would then try and contact the
  relevant support staff via SMS or mobile phone..
  i.e. there were no proper on-call arrangements.
• There were a few problems with this earlier
  approach
• The Comms manager was a single point of failure
  what if he/she was out of contact?
• There was no guarantee that support staff would
  be available
• The burden of responsibility was not shared
  fairly one or two people ended up doing it all.

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Current Out of Hours Support

• Given the increasing reliance on central
  infrastructure, it was decided that we should
  come up with a better out-of-hours support model.
  This was done in consultation with the
  groups/teams who provide that support.
• In the new support model, most senior staff in
  the group are on-call on a weekly basis.
  Non-technical staff (including the manager) share
  the role of resolution manager.

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Current Out of Hours Support

• The role of the resolution manager is similar to
  that which AARNet uses in that they are
  responsible for contacting the relevant on-call
  technical resource, make sure that the incident
  is dealt with properly and to filter calls (we
  only provide on-call support for unscheduled
  severity 1 incidents).
• As far as the roster goes, each week there is one
  resolution manager (out of a pool of 3), one
  network resource (pool of 4) and one voice
  resource (pool of 2) on-call.

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Current Out of Hours Support

• The Servicedesk is given a roster of who to call
  on what week. Note that they only call the
  resolution manager but there are details on who
  to call if the primary person cant be contacted.
• Since we are only on-call for severity 1
  incidents, junior staff arent used in the
  on-call system as they do not yet have the skills
  to fix major problems in any part of the network.
• On-call support is voluntary but since we had
  input on how we provide out-of-hours support and
  because we have very few severity 1 incidents
  out-of-hours, nobody has opted out.

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On-Call Allowances / Overtime

• Staff that are on-call are paid an allowance of
  30 of their base salary for the week they are
  on-call. This is not part of the Enterprise
  Agreement its an informal agreement between
  the staff, management and HR.
• Anyone who gets called when they are on-call get
  a minimum of 4 hours overtime paid per the
  Enterprise Agreement.
• Note that if a project requires a network
  resource to be on-call during scheduled changes
  then this is separate to the normal on-call
  arrangements and is paid as overtime.

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Miscellaneous

• All on-call staff are provided with the resources
  they need to provide support from whenever they
  are including a home broadband connection and
  3G/HSDPA modem for their laptop.
• There is a budget for on-call/overtime
  arrangements but given that the network is highly
  redundant and it is very rare for us to get
  called out of hours (less than once per month),
  we never spend it all.
• We also have an SMS alert service for critical
  infrastructure.