5 Ways to Improve Your Technology Troubleshooting

When you suffer from a technical difficulty, it’s your responsibility to ensure that it is handled in a timely fashion, whether it is reporting the issue to IT or taking care of it yourself. The process of troubleshooting, however, can save you from waiting around while IT tinkers with your device’s settings. Let’s examine the five stages of troubleshooting and how you might try them yourself.

Collect Information

First, you need to collect information that you can use to address the problem. What is the issue, and what is the scope? Is it one little thing on your PC or is it a network-wide issue? If you collect as much information as you can, you’ll have an easier time talking to IT about it. Chances are they will try to replicate the issue, and all of this information will be invaluable towards this end.

Analyze Your Approach

Next, you’ll need to use this information to determine the best path toward resolving your issue. Is there anything relevant in the data you can use to resolve the issue? You may have to adjust your approach based on your response to this question. You should be putting a plan in place that is data-informed whenever possible.

Implement Your Solution

With a solid plan in place, you can implement the proposed solution. You’ll want to be extremely careful, though. You should only implement a solution that you know solves the problem at hand. If you are not confident in your technology, then you should do more research until you are confident in it. The wrong solution could put you at a disadvantage.

Assess the Solution

After implementation, you’ll have to assess whether or not the solution actually worked. Some of the solutions you might implement are little more than stop-gaps that provide temporary fixes for larger problems, which is fine in its own way, so long as that is how you treat the solution. It’s your responsibility to know when it’s time to implement something better.

Document the Process

Now that you have a solid solution in place, you’ll want to ensure that your internal documents have recorded the processes for the fix. This helps others within your organization to understand the fix for later on, and it can keep others from engaging in a long and difficult (and now unnecessary) troubleshooting process.

OnSite I.T. wants to help your organization troubleshoot its technology needs. To learn more, reach out to us at (403) 210-2927.