In the last week I have been on the Framework for IT Support (known as FITS) training course to become a FITS Practitioner.
What is FITS?
FITS is a educational version of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL – more here) with elements taken out or enhanced to help with implementation into a school.
FITS is there to help move a schools current IT department into a more effective process and support driven department that support not just the IT equipment but all school processes in a school.
Its there to help technician and non-technical staff understand the IT processes with in the school and support the schools goals of supporting learning.
There are 11 main areas to FITS
If you know your ITIL you will notice a lot of these are similar but FITS really does make it educational relevant so the processes are around the schools procedures and policies.
Here are a few of the areas that are covered.
Service Desk
A Service Desk is where all users including your staff, pupils and parents can go to log a call. The method they contact you such as phone, visiting the office or email doesn’t matter as long as all calls are logged and tracked. The service desk are also responsible to notifying the user their call has been logged with an log number and whether they are happy that incident can be closed as it has been fixed to their expectation.
Its also the technicians responsibility to ensure that the service desk is kept up to date with the latest work they have been doing to rectify the issue.
Incident Management
When a fault has been logged with the service desk the issue needs fixing or a work around implemented. In incident management the service desk call is logged and then assigned to a technician to work with until the incident is rectified.
Problem Management
In Incident Management we either implement a fix or a work around but this doesn’t necessary mean that the root underlining issue has been fixed. Good example of this if a user has a laptop where the power pack keeps getting hot. The fix is to give the user a replacement but they are now on their third or fourth power pack. Problem management will look into if the laptop is using more power than it should causing it to get hot or it has the wrong fuse in the socket cable.
Problem management will also see other trends such as when your disk space on your file server will run out.
Change Management
We need to control the significant changes on the network to ensure they don’t impact the network that is currently being used in lessons. Change Management forms a committee to agree to the change and when it will be. Example: A teacher has requested software to be installed on the computers but they had new software installed last week that did the same thing. Why is there another piece being installed? How does it differ and how often will the school now use it?
Changes are formed through a Request for Change (RFC) that are created by staff and the technical team. We don’t want to implement a new product that causes the whole system to be down for the day.
These are only a few but if you want to know more, contact by leaving a comment below or by visiting the FITS Foundation website http://www.thefitfoundation.org
I took the FITS Practitioners exams today and PASSED!!! YEAH!!!