<deja vu> I used to work with/for a guy who thought it was expedient and efficient to put out an 85% completed system into production, and *then* tweak it. ( He was the Application Dev Manager while I was responsible for infrastructure ) So partway into the game, his 15% updates required infrastructure or system changes that were NOT on-the-fly updates, or he'd push out a change that flooded the vpns with chatty, inefficient message queueing, and my team and I were expect to solve ALL the problems and support the app without causing any downtime Actually, the guy was 85% brilliant in some of his ideas and did the company very well for years, it was the 15% not that, well, ......
Erik Goldoff IT Consultant Systems, Networks, & Security _____ From: James Rankin [mailto:kz2...@googlemail.com] Sent: Monday, August 31, 2009 3:59 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Change control (was RE: [On-Topic] Patching with PSEXEC) I've worked for a number of outsourcing companies and the change control is always very tight. It's the only way they can do it, but I admit it is completely inflexible for the client - particularly those that retain IT staff who now have to watch their systems managed by others who don't understand the particular intricacies of the business or the infrastructure. You are right about good change control being right in the middle of the change control spectrum. Can't say I've ever found a company that managed to strike the balance exactly right though. The reason my boss gets away with his cowboy approach is because he is prepared to sit there for 36 hours+ trying to get it working. I, on the other hand, am not. He bodges solutions together and then expects me to sanitize them and make them supportable.I love his approach though - he breaks something, then sends an email out to let users know that it is broken, and then puts the fastest fix in place he can find - usually reverting to where he started. He once deleted a snapshot I took before I'd finished testing, and made me completely unable to roll back my changes. He never seems to face any repercussions because our users (who are probably used to things packing up during the day) are happy as long as they get informed as to what's busted. Things would be much smoother if I could run them my way, but that's unlikely to happen because he is popular amongst the golf-playing directorship (ain't it always the same?) I, on the other hand, prefer boxing to golf and have an unfortunate habit of calling a spade a spade, which seems to preclude me from breaking into the management "click". Ho-hum. Still - it's only ten minutes drive from home :-) ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
