FAQ: “It doesn’t work”

When reporting an issue you’re experiencing it is important to provide enough detail to allow IT Services to diagnose the problem. This FAQ should help you split up the information you have so we can help you most effeciently:

1. Please describe what you are actually trying to do. You can include what you perceive to be the problem, but don’t jump to a diagnosis. State your initial aim.
2. Please explain why you think it “doesn’t” i.e. What is the behaviour you were expecting? How does this differ from the actual behaviour?
3. Please describe what it does do! Do you get any error messages? What are they? What did you do to get to this stage? Exactly what time did this happen? Exactly where on campus were you? What is your Uni username?

Each reported issue usually relates to one person, or a small group of people. Most University services have tens of thousands of users. Most problems have several possible causes. Providing enough detail will allow us to search service logs, account details and unscheduled service outage records to find the information that is relevant to you. Without this we can’t narrow down the possible list of causes, and thus it’s very difficult to provide a useful response to a query.