Problem solving tips for helpdesk personnel
| Home | 1. Symptoms | 2. Examine the evidence | 3. Confirm everything | 4. Research | 5. Postulate |
| 6. Identify the problem | 7. Provide a solution | 8. Confirm the solution | 9. Communicate & record | Useful links | |
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The Symptoms
It is vital you identify the symptoms. Quite often a user will call with "My computer is not working", but we all know how useless that is ! Here are some questions that are applicable to practically all problems:
1. What is the exact error message?
This maybe obvious, but sometimes it is easy to jump to conclusions based on partial information. If possible, get the user to send you a screendump (hold down the ALT button, then press the PrtScr buttons, go to e.g. Word, create a new document and select Paste from the Edit menu)
2. What were you doing at the time?
By determining this you can identify which program or which part of the program is causing the problem.
3. Has the error always ocurred or just started?
If the program has never worked, then it is possibly a fault with program. If it used to work OK, then you will need to find out at what point in time it stopped working.
4. If it has just started, have you recently installed any other software or made any other changes?
People are very reluctant to admit they have made changes - perhaps they are worried they will get into trouble? So, you will generally find that the answer to this question is "No", but never believe it. The program was working, now it isn't - something must have changed. Bear in mind that the user might not be aware of changes (e.g. many programs and even the operating system may do automatic updates) or they might not realise the significance of some apparently unrelated change.
5. Does it affect all machines or just yours?
If there are other machines that can use the program without problem, then the fault obviously lies with the configuration of this individual's machine.
If every machine has the same problem, it might be that they all have the same configuration problem or it might be a problem with the application's data.
6. In the case of networked programs. if you use the program from a different machine, do you get the same error?
If the error does not appear when you use the same application program from a different machine, then it is likely to be a fault in the configuration of the user's machine.