Troubleshooting Techniques: The Skills For Excellent IT Professionals

If you’re a technical manager, enterprise IT analyst, data center analyst, or even a call center analyst, understanding troubleshooting techniques is a requirement and much-desired skill for your industry. IT troubleshooting techniques are about applying both technical knowledge and logic to identify problems and faults. It is not about memorizing specific tasks for specific problem…any robot can do that. What you bring to the table as an IT professional is being able to use deductive reasoning to know which component needs to be tested or not. Excellent troubleshooters armed with technical knowledge and superior logical skills will use information they already know to reduce the amount of time needed to target a fault using an ingrained suspect list of components to optimize productivity. These are skills that anyone interested in IT can learn.

Noel Tenema, IT Troubleshooting Management Trainer and Consultant, has been an enterprise IT consultant for over 20 year and will bring his extensive knowledge of common troubleshooting issues and patterns to you in his course. His transcript below introduces the fundamentals of efficient troubleshooting using technical deduction and fault isolation. Through repetitive exercises and drills, his training will condition your technical reflexes to raise your troubleshooting intelligence. By the end of this comprehensive series, you as an IT professional should be able to use the methodical approach to IT troubleshooting techniques to rise above common troubleshooting to be an expert in the field. Enjoy the introductory transcript below that defines what makes a person an excellent IT troubleshooting detective.

Lecture Transcript:

Welcome to IT troubleshooting skill training. They say that troubleshooting is an innate skill – either you’re born with it or not. They say that the task involved in troubleshooting is abstract, therefore undefined. But despite its intangible qualities, troubleshooting skill can be clearly defined and developed in this course. Troubleshooting methods can be taught and standardized. Then once developed and standardized, troubleshooting can be once and for all the norm not the exception.

Let’s start in defining troubleshooting. What is troubleshooting? What is the goal of troubleshooting? The goal in troubleshooting is to identify problem cause or problem identification. Troubleshooting is not about resolving or fixing problems. It is solely about identifying the problem or fault, nothing more, nothing less.

Troubleshooting process: Troubleshooting process is about the process of efficient elimination using technical deduction and logical isolation to quickly identify the problem.

Troubleshooting task: Troubleshooting task is about eliminating and testing technical components as fast as you can until you locate and identify the fault. You should take note that a technical troubleshooter is not defined by how fast they can fix or resolve a problem. They are defined on how fast they can identify the problem.

Let’s continue in describing what troubleshooting is, but instead of comparing the good and the bad, let’s differentiate between a good troubleshooter from an excellent troubleshooter. A good troubleshooter uses positive test results to test one component at a time. In testing components, troubleshooters most likely will expect positive results to move forward the process of identifying the fault. If it gets a negative result, it will then move on into testing another component. An excellent troubleshooter uses both positive and negative results to test one or more components at a time. This means that regardless if the test result is positive or negative an excellent troubleshooter will move on with the process of fault identification.

A good troubleshooter knows how components behave if they’re functional or not. This is a basic technical knowledge and a skill attribute. An excellent troubleshooter uses deductive reasoning to know which component needs to be tested or not. Excellent troubleshooters armed with technical knowledge will deduct this information against suspected list of components to minimize problem duration. Applying this deductive skill seamlessly during technical encounters is what separates them from other analysts. A good troubleshooter uses technical skill or analytical skill in identifying technical faults. They are solely dependent on knowing the technical aspects of any hardware or software. An excellent troubleshooter uses reflexive but graceful logic in locating and identifying technical faults. This is about the speed in executing logical tasks over technical components with conviction and grace.

At the end of this skill training you will learn how to develop and raise your skill and be confident in troubleshooting this kind of technical issue. You will be able to use technical deduction and logical isolation methods to minimize problem duration and standardize approach to any kind of technical issues.

Learn the fundamentals of efficient troubleshooting using technical deduction and fault isolation with this course today!