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dadver
Asked: 2010-09-19 00:18:52 +0800 CST

IT counterpart to medicine's ICD-10/DSM-IV for diagnosing problems?

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I've often thought about why there aren't any diagnostics manual on a very broad level, a counterpart to the medical DSM-IV/ICD-10 manuals. From a troubleshooting perspective, the work of an investigative technician would be very much a like that of a physician: Gather information about the problem, investigate root cause and diagnose, provide information as to why the problem has occured, what is normal behavior and resolve it.

I would assume that a computer technician has better capabilities of understanding an IT problem since we've created computers and have defined how they should work (unlike medicine, which we're still learning many fundamentals of). If this assumption is correct, I imagine that it's possible to write such a manual that would also be very precise/exact.

So my thoughts are: Would it be beneficial to compile such a manual? Are there any obvious problems I've missed that makes this an impractical idea? Why haven't this already been done?

troubleshooting process manual

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    There are quite a few of these methodologies. One I've had direct and good experience of is a company called Kepner Tregoe who sell a training course called Analytic Troubleshooting (ATS):

    http://www.kepner-tregoe.com/theKTWay/WorkingWithKT-TeachYou-ATS.cfm

    Where they teach you a troubleshooting methodology similiar to the one you describe, quantifying the scope/scale/severity of a problem and so on. I still have and often refer to a set of thick plastic colour coded cards printed with the different steps of the method. The training was paid for by a company I worked for at the time and I think it was the best value training I've ever had. Technical training is past it's sell by date within a couple of years or so, the ATS method I learned is still effective 12 years on.

    Others I've seen: Cisco have a network troubleshooting methodolgy:

    http://www.cisco.com/iam/unified/ipcc1/System_Troubleshooting_Methodology.htm

    Toyota (famous for Lean Manufacturing) have the A3 Troubleshooting method:

    http://www.coe.montana.edu/ie/faculty/sobek/a3/index.htm

    More broadly the skills associated with critical thinking are very useful:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking

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