seat58F
outsourcing relationships: international, inter-economic, interpersonal
September 4, 2010 ~ 09:52:26 AM * -07:00ST
do not touch
Post # 581 by
admin on July 2nd, 2009 ~ 05:44:09 PM
Posted as app services, prod-control |
No Comments »
the old-school view of production control and scheduling is based on mainframe architecture - the application was hosted essentially on a single platform. if the application had to be up to match data entry shifts or jobs needed to execute to deliver reports by a certain time, then “do not touch” windows could be defined to minimize disruption.
newer architectures are harder to protect because the dependencies are difficult to discern. we can’t easily define where in the network user groups will relocate, and we don’t always recognize the relevant infrastructure components. That is unless we spend some money investing in, wait for it,,, configuration management.
watch the users carefully
Post # 578 by
admin on July 1st, 2009 ~ 05:09:16 PM
Posted as prod-support |
No Comments »
production support and maintenance is the stuff you do to manage software defects so that operations continue per the specifications. sounds good, but you would think that, with proper funding and assuming that software was functional in the first place, that the majority of defects would be resolved in short order and those charged with “production support” would soon have nothing to do.
User behavior is the main cause of and overloaded production support crew. Applications are never stable, new user requirements, misset expectations, and poor change resourcing keeps production support on their toes. A shifting architectural foundation of patches, upgrades, license constraints, and network reconfiguration keeps tickets flowing in to the service desk.
And don’t forget about the ever threatened maintenance windows and do-not-touch timeframes. These are constantly crimped by changes in use geography and business calendars. There’s little hope of profiling these effects in the original application requirements.
