Don’t wait until you have your Service Catalogue “closed”: that’s not happening (if you do things the right way…)

Posted: December 18th, 2009 | Author: Joaquín Bañez | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , | 3 Comments »
Moses introducing Service Catalogue v1.0

Moses introducing Service Catalogue v1.0

While reviewing a few requests for change to be submitted to the weekly CAB meeting, I told my manager about 2 of them in which there was no affected service recorded; well, in fact there was something written in the field “Affected Service”, but it was not present in the Service Catalogue.

My boss didn’t want to change it for one of the services that actually exist in our Service Catalogue as he says “the Service Catalogue is not closed yet”. I thought he meant our current Service Catalogue was only a draft pending of validation or whatever, but he didn’t: what he meant is that our Service Catalogue has not been carved in stone yet, if you let me put it that way. That’s what he means with “closed”. Well I’m afraid I have to tell him that’s never happening, if we do things the way God dictates…

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Send in the poka-yokes

Posted: October 9th, 2009 | Author: Joaquín Bañez | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | 1 Comment »

mini_usb_a-cWhile dabbling around with some Six Sigma papers this afternoon, I stumbled upon a funny term: poka-yoke. You can read about it here. A poka-yoke device is any mechanism that either prevents a mistake from being made or makes the mistake obvious at a glance, such as an USB connector which can be plugged one way only. It’s an error control mechanism oriented to avoid human mistakes when operating it.

There are plenty examples of poka-yoke devices and how to implement them on manufacturing chains and industrial processes, but I wonder: could they be useful on IT processes and procedures and how could they be implemented?

It’s important as many incidents raise in an organization due to human error; frequently, some RCA on those incidents conclude that an operator hit the wrong key or inserted the wrong tape on a drive… So, as to me poka-yokes look like a sound error-control mechanism, I’m looking for ideas on how to implement them on our IT Operation.