[ I'm trying to think of good things other companies have implemented rather than recommending things people hated ]
One idea might be to have set times/days during which you do some jobs so these can be all batched together. For example you might make changes to one set of firewalls on Monday and Thursday afternoons and require that tickets for those firewalls be submitted at least 8 hours before the change. Another idea might be to try and hook into the process earlier. For example if a lot of changes are due to new hardware then try and get some sort of notice when boxes are physically installed so you can anticipate a later firewall change. Same with perhaps working with designers and project managers to notify you beforehand. Maybe something like reserving a change resource or time for changes that have been arranged by projects or otherwise giving people an incentive to arrange things early. One problem I noticed in a previous job was that everything was so complex ( multiple layers of firewalls and NATs for instance ) that in many cases people didn't realise they *needed* a change until (say) a box was installed and running and it couldn't talk to another machine. Perhaps if you have a senior person who understands most of the interactions they could be available to explain to people that they will need this series of routes , firewalls rules and NATs in order for their service to work. Oh and try and avoid being the department that is so hard to deal with that people prefer to outsource, cloud-source or run things under their desks rather than work with. -- Simon Lyall | Very Busy | Web: http://www.darkmere.gen.nz/ "To stay awake all night adds a day to your life" - Stilgar | eMT. _______________________________________________ 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/
