Project, incident or change

ICT best practice dictates that ALL "requests for work" must go through a process of prioritisation.

In general terms all such "requests for work" will fall into one of three categories:

Incidents are typically unplanned events that require action e.g. a hardware failure or application crash. Incidents (or the symptoms) are normally logged in the first instance via the ICT Service Line (601 8888) but please note that the resolution may require considerable work. Incident priority is based on business impact eg. number of users affected, business critical system, VIP user.

Typically projects are larger, planned pieces of work that have high impact on the organisation. To qualify as a project there must be:

• A signed off business case
• Funding available
• The reason for carrying out the work is justified (e.g. to meet legislation, make efficiency savings, improve service delivery, etc)
• The costs must exceed a pre-determined threshold e.g. £20K of spend.

If you think the work may be a project, please contact the ICT Service Desk on 601 8888, who will put you in touch with a relevant ICT contact.

If it is not an incident or a project then you need to log a Change Request. Change Requests (formerly IT11s) are anything which isn't one of the other categories (i.e. neither a project or an incident but somewhere in between). Change Requests are used to log any work that impacts in some way on ICT. For example, even a simple request to "add a new user" can mean multiple teams in ICT are involved, licences need to be purchased and access to software and servers need to be organised in a secure and timely manner. Like incidents and projects, changes can vary in complexity and need to be assessed before prioritisation.

Some Change Requests can be identified as high volume, low impact, repetitive work e.g password resets, single standard workstation install, set up new user. These incidents are referred to as Standard Changes. Some standard changes can be logged with a help desk call but others require authorisation and so a Change Request is required. If you think your request may be a Standard Change please contact the ICT Service Line who can advise further (601 8888).