Head of Problem & IT Service Continuity Management

Mike Cox, Service Strategy & Improvement Department, Information Services Division (ISD).

I am the Head of Problem and IT Service Continuity Management within ISD. I’m responsible for designing and running a number of ISD’s service management processes, including Problem, Critical Incident, Availability and IT Service Continuity Management. I’m also involved in elements of Business Continuity Planning for the department. We have many highly skilled staff in ISD running IT services for UCL, and the processes that I run help our staff to deliver those services. The processes I own are mainly concerned with taking appropriate measures to proactively prevent our services going wrong, and ensuring that when things do go wrong we manage those incidents as best we can, and learn and improve as a result of any failures.
 

A typical day might involve identifying a problems that are proving difficult to resolve and looking at the reasons why, reviewing trends of service availability to identify possible underlying issues, or reviewing and updating our process documentation. On a less typical day, when we have a major issue on one of our services I’ll be in the “war room” making sure we’re managing the incident as best we can.

I joined UCL over 10 years ago as an IT Support Officer working on the Information Systems Helpdesk. This was a great introduction to working in ISD, giving broad experience with a number of technologies and services, as well as an understanding of the things our users struggled with or were frustrated by.  I then spent some time on assignment to a project delivering a new service management tool for use within ISD, as part of an initiative to mature our service management capability. The experience I gained on that project led me to a role working in a newly formed service management team, initially split between supporting the change management process and developing a new problem management process. Over the years the team has grown and taken on responsibility for more processes, and my role has expanded accordingly. UCL has supported me with training across a number of service management frameworks and concepts, including ITIL, DevOps, COBIT and SIAM.

My advice to others seeking to develop their career in IT Service Management would be to seek out others working in the field to share experience and best practice with. There are a number of communities and events both within and outside  the university sector which are great sources of knowledge. Secondly, try to be proactive in seeking out development opportunities. If there is a project or initiative that you think will be interesting, see if you can get involved. Assignments and secondments are valuable ways of gaining experience