CSCS offers IT services on an 'opt in' basis primarily for the School of Clinical Medicine, but also serving some departments and institutions from the School of Biological Sciences. This document will outline our delivery targets for the services that we support.  

Customers

CSCS provides services to departments and individuals who opt in to receive specific IT services directly from CSCS. In some instances departments take CSCS infrastructure as a service and manage the direct support of their end users themselves.  The following service commitments do not apply consistently to both types of service provision and exceptions will be noted on the list of our service offerings.

Services and our Service Catalogue

We keep our subscription costs as low as we can by offering standard services and delivering them in a consistent fashion. For that reason, any requests that go outside of what has been established will need to be carefully considered by CSCS to assess the impact to our existing services, staff, processes and tools and may well not result in a change to our service in the short term.  You can see a list of our current service offerings here - CSCS Services and How to Access Them. This page provides links to the service catalogue should you wish to request any of these services.  

Response and resolution of Incidents and Service Requests

CSCS strives to provide a consistent and appropriate experience for all of our customers and end users.  Due to the nature of the University we do not have absolute control over some the technical parts of our infrastructure so we express these as targets. We report against our targets monthly to the Clinical School senior management team.

We classify incoming contacts to CSCS as either Incidents or Service Requests.  Incidents are typically when something is broken, down, severely impacted or not working as expected.  A Service Request represents a request to add, amend, or remove a service from our service catalogue.  Incidents and Requests are subject to different procedures and targets as outlined below.

Incident Prioritisation

When logging an incident on our self service portal you are asked to assess impact and urgency of your issue; from this, we set a priority between 1 and 5. Our staff will then review and may adjust according to our workload and other commitments at the time. The highest priority will always be an issue that stops someone from working, with a view to getting them to a working state either by a fix or a work around.  

Below is the matrix of impact and urgency that we use to prioritise issues with the impact on the left and urgency across the top.

Incident Response Times

We aim to acknowledge and respond to a new incident within the time frames outlined below.  Note these are expressed in working hours.

• P1 = 1 hour

• P2 = 2 hours 

• P3 = 8 hours

Incident Resolution Targets

We aim to resolve an incident within the time frames outlined below.  Note these are expressed in working hours.

• P1 = 2 hours

• P2 = 1 working day

• P3 = 3 working days

Service Request Resolution Targets

Each service request in the service catalogue has a predefined delivery target.  Most will display a Delivery Estimate when the Service Request is logged. Note the Average Delivery information is not necessarily accurate.

Service Uptime and Availability Commitments

We aim for our services to be up and available for use 99% of the time during working hours.

Change Windows and Notifications of Works

We have a weekly change window from Wednesday 17:30 to Thursday 08:00 (14.5 hour window).  If we are completing non-disruptive maintenance (which involves no downtime or impact on users) this will take place during this period with no notification.

• Planned outage / downtime – notification for planned outages/downtime during a vulnerable period will be sent 6 days beforehand (the Thursday before). Then a reminder will be sent the day before the outage.

• Unplanned outage / downtime – As soon as possible, subsequent updates to be sent as soon as more information becomes available, or workaround is implemented.

CSCS Working Hours

CSCS is open from 8:30 am - 5:00 pm weekdays, excluding bank and University / School holidays or closures. The Service Desk has slightly different hours and is open from 9-5pm.

In order to keep our staff trained and informed, we may hold staff events once per quarter which will result in the closure of our service for half a day for the event.

Monitoring and After Hours Activities

We monitor our infrastructure outside of working hours and should any part of the core functionality fail we will attend and intervene.  Core functionality is: core routing and network services, ability to log in, Group Drives and other data storage, VPN, Email

Contacting CSCS

Our Self Service Portal is https://itsupportcscs.haloitsm.com/portal/home. You can log incidents and service requests and track the progress of your open issues here.

Phone: 01223 336261 (open during our working hours)

In person: CSCS is not currently open to drop-in visits. You must prearrange your visit by speaking with one of our staff.

The CSCS Service Desk acts as your single point of contact into the team on the phone, self service portal or in email.

Escalations

Should you have any comments or concerns regarding our services you can contact the service desk or any of the CSCS management team using the dedicated feedback Email address: cscsfeedback@medschl.cam.ac.uk

Surveys

We may send out surveys after a ticket has been closed. We also do annual satisfaction surveys.

Customer Obligations

Anyone who uses CSCS services is a customer and needs to be aware of and follow the relevant policies as outlined on this page: https://cscs.medschl.cam.ac.uk/about-us/policies/.  To access any CSCS services you will need a CSCS account which costs £5.37/month.