2008/11/20 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > On Fri, 21 Nov 2008, Simon Lyall wrote: > > <snip good advice> > > I understand the various things that I _could_ do. I have proposed many of > them myself and the general response is that to do anything other than > implement the tickets one at a time as they come in as fast as we can > (interrupt driven work) is not being business friendly. > > at this point I'm not asking for advice of how I can re-architect my > network, create self-service tools, etc. I'm trying to understand what > other companies do. > > when you get requests for changes do you process them immediatly, same > day, once a week, other? > > I don't have a lot of different companies worth of experiance, so I'm > trying to get a general feel of how others do this. > > and to answer Elizabeth Z with her 'would you jump if all your friends > did' comment. in this case if the norm is to process all tickets interrupt > style yes, we will have to continue to work that way and concentrate our > efforts at doing it better. (I see this as doing the wrong thing faster) > > however if we can point out that this isn't normal and it's common to > batch things (with evidence to back us up), we can then hopefully get past > the initial "you aren't being responsive enough to us" reactions and get > the conversation to where it needs to be (starting with why we get 3 hours > notice to implement tickets for a 6 month project).
What I've found to be "normal" (as in common across more than one company and sensible) is to have change windows (as Simon mentioned) for different types of change; specificaly with respect to network changes there would be a "high impact change" (changes which require actions which impact users where they will notice it happening) and "low impact changes" (changes which have a very low risk of impacting users while they are being carried out). Windows could be weekly or daily as appropriate to requirements but changes are implemented within those windows only and only emergency changes are carried out outside those times if the relevant backing/signoff is obtained. You do need management backing to move to this kind of model but you can generally prove better reliability, repeatability, uptime for users etc. so it is, in fact, business friendly as the users get a better experience at the cost of having to plan a teensy bit in advance. K -- http://www.totkat.org/ _______________________________________________ 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/
