Posted: September 22nd, 2009 | Author: Joaquín Bañez | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: forensic analysis, problem management, quality management | 1 Comment »
I read on The Opposite of Luck blog a post about a forensic report explaining the cause of an incident that caused an outage at Fisher’s Plaza Technology Complex in Seattle and took down many websites hosted there.
Like them, I applause how transparently Fisher’s Plaza have dealt with this incident, specially regarding their tenants, as they really deserve an explanation.
You can read the full report here.
Your users also deserve an explanation when an IT service goes down; you don’t have to give them a 12 page report for every problem you manage, but you can’t simply shrug your shoulders and tell them “shit happens”.
Posted: September 21st, 2009 | Author: Joaquín Bañez | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: change management, release management | 1 Comment »
Excuse me if I’m rude, but many idiotic things have happened around at my office: we’ve finally launched our new service desk tool, after 9 months developing it (average time spent at other clients was 1 or 2 months). Though it was meant to be ITIL compliant and so support the adoption of the framework, our IT manager has decided to, er, redefine some ITIL terms, specially those regarding change management and SLAs.
So, he has introduced a new type of change: urgent changes. Nothing to do with emergency changes: urgent. What’s an urgent change? A change to be done ASAP. But not in an emergency case, ie: a project manager wants to deploy his new version of app X, and he wants it now. This new version doesn’t solve a major issue with the previous release or adds functionality that the business imperatively needs due to legal issues or whatever reason you can think of for an emergency change, because, and that’s the point, it’s not an emergency. Usually, it will just be a project deadline too close and a project manager unwilling to take the blame for the delay of the release (why take the blame when you have the IT crowd to take that blame as “they won’t deploy the app until next week”?).
Where I see nothing but fighting what a best practices framework dictates, my manager and his mates think they’ve had a great idea because with urgent changes they show how customer oriented they are. Bullshit.
And WTF, where the hell have they read on ITIL core books the term “urgent change”???
