Supervisor only · Week 3

Running the service desk week

Four things are open this week and they are meant to be done in order: the desk reference, the Triage Trainer, the Service Desk Arcade, then the exam. Everything is graded and explained in the browser. You point them at the hub, you say the four things below out loud, and on Thursday you read their shift report.

Time it takes you

Fifteen minutes on Sunday or Monday, ten minutes on Thursday. Nothing in between unless they ask.

Time it takes them

Twenty minutes on the desk reference, two to three hours on the twenty four tickets, and about ninety minutes on the assessment. The arcade is what they do instead of scrolling.

What you get back

A shift report per intern: tickets judged, and the percentage right on type, priority and route separately, plus how many times a loud ticket swayed them.

Put this on the screen

What they type

jahez-coop-lab.pages.dev

That is the whole address. No password, no invite code, nothing to install. They create an account with their work email, which takes about ten seconds, and everything they do from that moment is credited to them.

If you want them to land straight on the sign-up form rather than the sign-in one, add /?join=2026-fall to the end. It is optional and it carries nothing personal — deliberately, because a link with somebody's address in it ends up in browser history and in the server logs.

Tell them to use the same browser all week. Progress is kept on the machine they are sitting at.

Fifteen minutes at the start

The four things to say out loud

Priority is calculated, never chosen. They judge impact and urgency separately and the priority falls out of the grid. There is no priority button anywhere in the lab, and that is deliberate. It is the single thing most people get wrong on a real desk.
The user's stated priority is wrong on twenty one of the twenty four tickets. Not occasionally — almost always. Some are marked Urgent and are P4; one is written politely and is a P1. The word in the email is how the user feels, not how the ticket is scored.
The type decides everything after it. If the type is wrong the priority cannot be right, because a different process is measuring it. Thirteen of the twenty four are incidents, seven are service requests, two are problems and two are changes.
Two tickets go to Cyber GRC and nowhere else. A phishing report and a suspected supplier bank fraud. Sending either straight to a colleague, deleting the mail, or searching the mailbox yourself destroys the evidence. Cyber GRC is one door and it is the only one.

What not to say
Do not walk them through the priority grid before they start. They have the desk reference and the Trainer explains every answer as they go. Being wrong on ticket three and told why is worth more than being told first and being right on ticket three for no reason.

What they will hit

The eight tickets that catch nearly everyone

Every ticket in the bank explains itself after the answer, so you do not need to teach these. Recognise them when an intern gets stuck, and ask the question in the last column.

Ticket	They usually say	It is	Ask them
T03 URGENT!!! second screen	P1, because the subject shouts	Service request, P4	"Who set that priority, you or the sender?"
T09 dispatch board question	P3, because it is politely written	Incident, P1, L3	"How many people cannot work right now?"
T14 wifi terrible today	Fix the one laptop	Incident, P1, L3	"Did you check anyone sitting near her?"
T16 EVERYTHING IS DOWN	P1, because it says whole company	Incident, P3, L2	"Who else did you check before you believed it?"
T02 new girl needs the folder	Incident, she cannot work	Service request	"Did she ever have that access?"
T13 new keyboard please	Catalogue order, wait for approval	Incident — a part failed	"Did the keyboard work last week?"
T06 FW: is this real?	Delete it, praise her, close	Incident → Cyber GRC	"Who else got that mail?"
T21 recordings missing	Pass to L3 and wait	Incident → Vendor, P2	"Whose system is it, and who still owns the user's ticket?"

Four of the twenty four cannot be judged from what is written and need a question asked first. An intern who answers all twenty four without ever saying "I would ask" has not read them properly.

The arcade

Why there is a game, and what it is for

Ticket Rush

Sixty seconds, type only. Speed builds a multiplier, a wrong call resets it and costs three seconds. It drills the first decision until it is automatic.

Under Pressure

Ten tickets, three lives, impact and urgency judged separately while the queue fills. Getting the right letter from the wrong reading scores eight instead of twenty five, and says so.

Where Does It Go

Routing to L1, L2, L3, Vendor, Cyber GRC or Not IT. This is the one that exposes whether the six destinations landed.

XP comes from beating your own best, not from playing
A round that matches or misses their previous best earns nothing, so grinding the same game does not inflate a rank. If you see a large arcade score, they genuinely improved.

The assessment

Two different things, and they are not interchangeable

	Full assessment	Foundation style mock
Shape	80 questions, 5 tickets, 3 written answers	40 questions drawn from the 61 that sit on the ITIL 4 Foundation syllabus
Clock	None. It saves after every answer and resumes where they stopped	60 minutes, closed book, no feedback until the end
Feedback	After every question, with the reasoning	At the end only, with the ones they missed
Pass mark	None. It is a diagnosis, not a gate	65 percent, the real one
Use it for	Finding out what they do not know	Finding out whether they would pass on the day

Confidently wrong is tracked separately
Every question in the full assessment asks whether they were sure. The report counts how many times they were sure and wrong. That number matters more than the score: it is the one that costs on a live desk, and it is the number to open the Thursday conversation with.

The bank knows ITIL Version 5 exists. Those questions, along with the ISO comparisons and the L1/L2/L3 tiering, are deliberately kept out of the mock — they are good desk knowledge and they are not on the Foundation paper.

Ten minutes on Thursday

Reading a week 3 shift report

The report separates type, priority and route on purpose. The gaps between those three numbers are where the conversation is.

What you see	What it usually means	What to ask
Type high, priority low	They can classify but they are still reading the user's mood. The most common pattern, and the easiest to fix.	"On T09, what made it a P1 when nobody shouted?"
Priority high, route low	They judge severity well and do not yet know who owns what. Send them back to the six destinations on the desk reference.	"Who fixes a wireless design problem, and who fixes one laptop?"
Swayed count above three	Loud tickets are moving them. This is the habit the whole week exists to break.	"Which ticket did you re-read after you saw the answer?"
All three high, no timed shift	They did the practice queue with the explanations in front of them and never tested it cold.	"Run a shift before Thursday." It is eight tickets and it takes ten minutes.
Confidently wrong above five	Guessing with conviction. Worth more attention than any score on the page.	"Pick one of those. What would have to be true for the other answer to be right?"

The one question worth asking every intern
"Which ticket did you get wrong in a way you would not have believed?" It takes thirty seconds and it tells you whether the week actually landed.

Supervisor only

Running week 2 without running week 2

Everything in the Ops Range is injected, graded and explained by the software. There is no lab to stand up, no licence to buy, no account to create and no session for you to deliver. Your job is three things: point them at the hub, answer questions when they ask, and read the shift report at the end of the week.

Time it takes you

Ten minutes at the start of the week, ten minutes at the end of it. Nothing in between unless they ask.

Time it takes them

About seventy minutes of Academy and four to six hours on the Range, spread across five days.

What you get back

A text file per trainee listing every mission, the hints taken, the collateral caused and whether the first call was right.

Ten minutes at the start

What to say when you hand it over

The estate is a training model of a normal corporate network. It is not our production network and none of the addresses in it are real. Do not treat anything in it as a documented Jahez fact.
Progress is stored in the browser, on their own machine. If they clear site data or switch browser, it is gone. Tell them to use the same browser all week.
Hints cost twenty five points. Collateral damage costs sixty. That difference is deliberate and it is the single most important thing to say out loud.
The capstone has no hints. Two faults and one report that is not a fault.
They export the shift report themselves at the end. You do not need to collect anything from their machine.

Ten minutes at the end

Reading a shift report properly

Total XP is the least interesting number on the page. These four tell you something.

What you see	What it usually means	What to ask them
High XP, several collateral	Changing things to see what happens, rather than reading first. Common and fixable.	"Walk me through M12. What told you that line was the wrong one?"
Low hints, wrong first calls	Persistent but guessing. They are solving by elimination, not by reasoning.	"On M09, what were the three things it could have been before you looked?"
Right first calls, many hints	They can reason and they do not trust it. The most improvable pattern here.	"You called M06 correctly. Why did you take a hint after that?"
Tier 3 untouched	Either they ran out of week, or the service and firewall layer did not land.	"What are the three reasons a share can fail?" The answer is path, service, filter.
Capstone solved, clean, no hints	They can hold two faults apart and leave a non-fault alone. That is the outcome.	"Why did you leave Gi1/0/12 shut?"

The one question worth asking every trainee
"Which mission taught you something you would not have got from reading?" The answer tells you whether the exercise did its job, and it takes thirty seconds.

Answer key

Injected fault, win condition and the trap, per mission

Read this before you rely on the key being hidden.

It is not hidden, and it cannot be. The Ops Range grades and explains in the browser, so missions.js has to carry every injected fault, every correct first call and every fix. The same is true of exam_data.js and tickets.js. Anyone who opens the developer tools can read all of it in under a minute.

This page used to hide the key behind a word. That was worse than useless: it implied a protection that did not exist. It is gone.

Which is fine, because none of this is assessment. The programme says so itself — unlimited retakes, the score is for the trainee and not for their file. A trainee who reads the answers has only cheated themselves out of the practice. If any of it ever has to count — a graded exam, a certificate, anything a decision rests on — it cannot be marked in the browser. That needs the answers held server side and the grading done there, which is a different build, not a setting.

Answer key

All fifteen faults

The grader

What "solved" actually requires

A mission only closes when two independent checks both pass, which is why a trainee cannot make a symptom go away and call it fixed.

1. The service baseline

Fifteen assertions run against the live estate on every keystroke: thirteen things that must work, and two that must stay blocked. The trainee sees them as the service board on the left of the screen.

2. Structural integrity

Every port VLAN, trunk allowed list, SVI state, DHCP relay, host address, running service, host firewall and access-list line is compared against the intended design. Anything that differs is either the fault or collateral damage. There is no third category.

Restoring service by putting everyone into one VLAN fails the check.
Clearing the access list to fix printing fails the check, because it removes the guest segmentation.
Enabling the parked port on the Floor 1 switch fails the check, because that port is correct as it is.

Scoring

The model, in full

Component	Value	Why it is set there
Base XP	110 to 230, capstone 400	Roughly proportional to how many layers the trainee has to rule out.
Correct first hypothesis	+40	Rewards reasoning before touching. Marked on the first answer only.
Each hint	−25	Escalation is legitimate and it is not free. Three hints exist per mission and the third names the fix.
Each piece of collateral	−60	Deliberately more than two hints. Asking is cheaper than breaking something.
Debrief questions	+15 each	Answered after the fix, from memory. Retrieval is what makes it survive the week.
Speed	up to +50	Capped low on purpose. It is a tiebreak between two correct answers, never a reason to rush.
Floor	20 XP minimum	A mission solved badly is still a mission solved.

Ranks are lab-wide, not per app, and there is one ladder: Trainee, Service Desk L1 at 400, Service Desk L2 at 1000, Infrastructure Engineer at 1800, Systems Engineer at 2800, Corporate IT Certified at 4000. XP comes from every surface — Academy lessons, Range missions, path stages, and beating your own arcade best — so the rank beside their name is the whole programme, not one week of it.