University of NSW
Communication Services
Out-of-Hours Support
Description of IT at UNSW
• Like many other large organizations, UNSW has
oscillated between a centralised and distributed
support model.
• At the moment we have a hybrid model with support
for centralized services and infrastructure as well as
local faculty support (that report to the CIO) for
school- or faculty-level desktops and applications
etc.
Servicedesk
• One number / single point of contact for IT
support
• Normal Phone and Email Support hours are
8AM to 8PM weekdays.
• There is a skeleton crew of (student) casuals
after hours. Users are directed to the
Servicedesk manager’s mobile if no staff are
available.
Communications Services
• Our group looks after all aspects of the
voice and data network infrastructure
• Given that the voice and data networks are
critical infrastructure, our team is required
to also provide limited out-of-hours support
Out of Hours Support:
The Old Way
• In the past, this was done in a fairly ad-hoc
manner; the Servicedesk would call the Comms
manager who would then try and contact the
relevant support staff via SMS or mobile phone..
i.e. there were no proper on-call arrangements.
• There were a few problems with this earlier
approach:
– The Comms manager was a single point of failure –
what if he/she was out of contact?
– There was no guarantee that support staff would be
available
– The burden of responsibility was not shared fairly – one
or two people ended up doing it all.
Current Out of Hours Support
• Given the increasing reliance on central
infrastructure, it was decided that we should come
up with a better out-of-hours support model. This
was done in consultation with the groups/teams
who provide that support.
• In the new support model, most senior staff in the
group are on-call on a weekly basis. Non-technical
staff (including the manager) share the role of
resolution manager.
Current Out of Hours Support
• The role of the resolution manager is similar to
that which AARNet uses in that they are
responsible for contacting the relevant on-call
technical resource, make sure that the incident is
dealt with properly and to filter calls (we only
provide on-call support for unscheduled severity 1
incidents).
• As far as the roster goes, each week there is one
resolution manager (out of a pool of 3), one
network resource (pool of 4) and one voice
resource (pool of 2) on-call.
Current Out of Hours Support
• The Servicedesk is given a roster of who to call on
what week. Note that they only call the resolution
manager but there are details on who to call if the
primary person can’t be contacted.
• Since we are only on-call for severity 1 incidents,
junior staff aren’t used in the on-call system as
they do not yet have the skills to fix major
problems in any part of the network.
• On-call support is voluntary but since we had
input on how we provide out-of-hours support and
because we have very few severity 1 incidents outof-hours, nobody has opted out.
On-Call Allowances / Overtime
• Staff that are on-call are paid an allowance of 30%
of their base salary for the week they are on-call.
This is not part of the Enterprise Agreement – it’s
an informal agreement between the staff,
management and HR.
• Anyone who gets called when they are on-call get
a minimum of 4 hours overtime paid per the
Enterprise Agreement.
• Note that if a project requires a network resource
to be on-call during scheduled changes then this is
separate to the normal on-call arrangements and is
paid as overtime.
Miscellaneous
• All on-call staff are provided with the resources
they need to provide support from whenever they
are including a home broadband connection and
3G/HSDPA modem for their laptop.
• There is a budget for on-call/overtime
arrangements but given that the network is highly
redundant and it is very rare for us to get called
out of hours (less than once per month), we never
spend it all.
• We also have an SMS alert service for critical
infrastructure.