On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 2:59 PM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > we are working on this, but one of the questions that came up is 'how do > other companies deal with this', which is why I am asking the list. >
For the "we need it right now" issues we will generally do it, but with admonishment and some arm-waving. For repeated offenses of failure to bring in the right resources in a timely fashion, requests are made at upper level management to have their staff play nicer with the other kids. The nuclear option is always to say "no, you need to wait for our change control process, kthxbai" To me it sounds like your being bitten by two things: - outside parties nickle-and-diming you to death due to lack of advance notice and then complain because you're holding up their work. That's a social problem and technology won't fix it in total. It sounds like this is something where sitting down and doing some expectation management would be highly beneficial. I suggest finding the 5 worst offenders, talk to 'em and show them the metrics. If that doesn't work give the metrics to your upper management to show to their upper management and insist that your group be brought in sooner in the project's life. Often, when getting down to the root of issues like this, I've found that that root cause is a poorly communicated policy from a ill-informed staffer being poorly encoded in a doc/guide/howto of the other group. Clearing up that misinformation helps everyone. - Your tools need some lovin' to make your life easier. Depending on your environment and what kind of glue you already have, addressing this might have less return than hiring dedicated minion to reduce the load. It also sounds like you have really good metrics, so you may be able to make the case for funding to offload some of your tasks for a long enough time to have the slack to address the issues. It's hard to ignore an argument that says "we spend $x/transaction and if we invest $y over the next 6 months we can get that down to $x-z which will payback that investment in less than 2 quarters after completion" -n -- ------------------------------------------- nathan hruby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> metaphysically wrinkle-free ------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
