How Announcements are constructed

Overview:
The IT Announcements Service is owned and maintained by the IT Services Centre within IT User Services.

Announcements are constructed in response to current issues, events, upgrades, forthcoming changes or any other important information relating to IT Service provision. In most cases this information is sent to the “its-announce” email distribution list, however special arrangements can be made to send to specific authorised audiences.

The “subject line” of an announcement email is constructed in a structured manner, as follows:

• Example:   [Important] - Networks - Planned Outage - 9 February 2008
• Meaning:   [Priority] - Service Affected - Type of Effect/Impact - Date of Effect

It gives a flavour of what is to be covered in the body of the announcement text. Explanations of what each section of the “subject line” mean are detailed below:

Priority:
The Priority of an event is evaluated and allocated to the Announcement being prepared. These priorities are defined in the following table:

Service Affected:
The Service Affected informs the reader which Service is being covered within the announcement. For example: Networks, Email, Desktop Support, IT Security, etc.

Type of Effect:

Explanation of use:

• "Planned Maintenance " :
  Should only be used when giving adequate notice (a minimum of 4 days) of an event or change that has been appropriately planned and approved via Change Control, that does not involve any outage to services or systems. e.g. Application or System enhancements.
• "Planned Outage":
  Should only be used when giving adequate notice (a minimum of 4 days) of an event or change that has been appropriately planned and approved via Change Control that involves an outage to services or systems. e.g. System upgrades or implementations and major application upgrades or enhancements.
• "Required Maintenance ":
  Should only be used when giving short term notice (between half a day and 3 days) of a Change or event that is required to be performed to fix a current issue, prevent an issue from occurring or worsening, or to accommodate an urgent business requirement, that does not involve any outage to a system or service.
• "Required Outage ":
  Should only be used when giving short term notice (between half a day and 3 days) of a Change or event that is required to be performed to fix a current issue, prevent an issue from occurring or worsening, or to accommodate an urgent business requirement, that involves an outage to a system or service.
• "Current Outage" and "Current Issue":
  Should only be used to give immediate (under half a day) notice or advice about a current issue or outage affecting system(s) or services(s).
• "IT Security Notification":
  Should only be used to notify customers in relation to Security type information and/or exposures.
• "General Notification":
  Should only be used to notify customers in relation to general information that may be of interest.
• "Decommission":
  Should only be used to notify customers giving adequate notice (a minimum 4 days) in relation to the planned decommissioning of a legacy system or service.
• "Commission":
  Should only be used to notify customers giving adequate notice (a minimum 4 days) in relation to the planned commissioning of a new system or service.

Type of Effect also is indicative of the lead time given to publish the announcement:

Date of Effect:
The Date of Effect informs the reader when any Service Affected is encountering an issue, is scheduled to be made unavailable, requires a change to be made or some form of action to be taken.

Download full version of "How to construct an Announcement" [doc, 64kb]

How to :

• become an Announcements Submitter
• construct an Announcement
• submit an Announcement
  
• receive Announcements via Email
• find Announcements
• relate to the Service Status.

Go back to 'About Announcements'