A statement by a faculty member to the effect of, “There isn’t anything our IT people can do to resolve this problem. The web application is overloaded,” puts the people running the application on the defensive. The problem turned out to be resolved with changes to the local browser environment (remove all the installs of Java and replace with a single known good version). In other words, it wasn’t only because the web application was overloaded and could have been resolved by their IT people consulting the knowledge base intended to provide the information to resolve exactly this kind of stuff.

The last situation we want to have is an overloaded server before we even hit the heavy usage period.