Posts filed under 'Change Control'
At one of the hospitals in the Bay Area, when you check in to deliver your baby, they ask you if your husband is an engineer or works in hi-tech. If the answer is “yes”, you get a long and stern lecture from the person at the station checking you in, not to play around and change settings on the monitoring machines in the delivery room.
Apparently people going in and plaing with the monitoring equipment is a big cause of downtime on the monitoring equipment, which is a pain, because then the nurse has to rush to the room to see if it is dis-connected or something else is wrong.
The would love to lock the equipment or the father down and keep the key — both work
November 1st, 2006
I was with a large company in San Fransisco, talking to the VP of IT operations. They were in the middle of a moving sun machines from corporate to a data center. About an year they noticed that suddenly a set of servers were having problems, they had couple of failures within a week. These machines had been untouched for a long time. Then nothing happened till 3 months later and they had couple of failures again.
Someone pointed out that during both those weeks the coffee machine on the floor below was not working so people had been coming upstairs to get coffee. They figured out that people would walk past these machines and see the disk light on or some light blinking and would log in to see what was happening. Tinker little bit … And this caused downtime!!!
That was one of the factors in moving the servers to the data center as people felt the tinkering would go away and increase stability.
November 1st, 2006
As an immigrant to the US, it took a while before I got comfortable using the bathrooms in the gas stations on long drives. In most other countries, the bathrooms tend to be unusable. In Britain you have to deposit money to use them and the auto-clean can be interesting experiences.
My wife and I always talked about how they managed to keep those things clean. And it occurred to us one day that it was all because of the long unwieldy things the key is attached to. You can’t loose the key or leave it in the lock.
As I sit in a lot of these ITIL conversations around change management, I find myself smiling. Only if we could maintain the same process around our infrastructure, like the gas stations have around their bathrooms, availability would jump another 9 atleast. Keep the infrastructure locked, till there is an approved change (like the guy who bought gas at your station) and then give them the key with a really long handle, so they can’t loose it or forget it or pass it to someone else
There are some great ideas and parallels in the book by Suellen Hoy
Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (Paperback)
Enjoy! 
October 30th, 2006
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