Incidents Mismanagement - For good and for worst

Incidents… No matter how many projects we run, no matter how many people we task to problem solving, no matter how much money, time, sweat and blood we invest in IT Production, there are always INCIDENTS !

Their management tends to be an end in itself, a core business for many people that (perhaps?) need incidents to justify their jobs, proficiencies, and lives even.

Enough of empty words: perhaps you want to learn something useful here?

Here’s a recurring question: “how d we account incidents” ?

Basically, there are two approaches (who said “that of the IT Production and the good one”?)

1) The IT Production monitors all IT services by itself. It thus can detect incidents, often before the end users. Monthly reports of how many incidents were spotted by the IT Production are then sent to the Client -> that’s a bad approach, because you give numbers irrelevant to the users. This gives the impression that the IT Production is always in a mess. Ok… It’s true most of the time, but still: the end user don’t give a shit about that, this just might be used against you

2) The IT Production lets the end users report service interruptions. Then, it tries frantically to restore the service. At the end of the month, you will have a report of the total number of incidents spotted by your end users (who said “Clients”?). However this is a bad approach, since everybody will blame your lack of anticipation.

Now the “best practice”? You must adopt the “first approach” to manage incidents, and the second to report on incidents… This should minimize the incidents actually impacting the users, and diminish the number of incidents on monthly reports…

Otherwise, there are plenty of “bad practice” tricks to cover-up, makeup and hide incidents… But… Hey… I don’t know them, of course!

Nobody does…

At least, not in our IT Production!

Visual Management: Right or Wrong ?

In IT Production, people work on the intangible: virtual jobs, virtual processes, virtual environments… but hey, incidents are real, money is not so virtual, and, above all, users and clients tend to be very real…

When you work in a factory, it’s “easy” (well… not so in fact) to “see” the problems: stacks of parts, idle machines, piles of raw materials…

IT Production is a “virtual factory”: our stacks, spare parts, stores, inventories… Everything is “virtual”.

So? How do we make visible the invisible ?

Try Visual Management of the Performance: one of the key features of the Lean!

However… You might have some (bad) surprises. You might discover stacks of waste, piles of lost time… There is always room for improvement!

Happy Week End!

Welf, Happy man in the Happy IT Production

Mips! Moooore Mips! (monitor that!)

Thanks to the Moore Law (and the hard work of some scientists), the raw power of computers is ever increasing. Faster that any curve of economic growth.

However, the “consumption of power for business needs” is increasing just about as fast. That’s one of the downsides of the Moore Law: IT Production is always trying to cope with business needs, even in periods of economic downturn.

Thus, one of the key issues is to monitor CPU consumption. But remember: when you observe something, you tend to alter it somehow… Especially if monitoring solutions are provided by cumbersome corporations who sell the power: that’s being judge and party!

Get Back to some Real Work: The CAB is back!

At least, we're back to business...

It's good to see that the stripgenerator is up and running... Like all users in front of an IT incident, all that I could do was to walk in circles, cursing the IT Production...

We'll... The stripgenerator is free: that's value for my money :D

Anyway, let's get back to the Happy IT Production... Today, let's wander to the CAB... As you can see, people never run out of pompous vocabulary and hyperbolic metaphor. Especially if some Big Blue Corp Consultants are in the neighbourhood. That's one of the great benefits of ITIL and ISO: to provide geeks and nerds of the IT Production new words and a degree in "corporate language"...

Happy IT: Real Incidents suck!

Well... The "stripgenerator" I use to create the strips for this blog is down since Monday 18(stripgenerator.com is not responding)...

This time, I've been caught back by the true realties of IT Production. I feel like any user...

*Sigh*

I hope Happy IT will be back soon...

Welf

Production Incidents around the world

Life can be so... Different, wether you work for the "real" industry (real people with real jobs), or for some kind of IT Production, far away from the real world, in a remote galaxy well preserved from Clients...

Spirit of nonsense...

Life in the IT Production can sometimes be somewhat frustrating...

The nightmare...

For many of us, in the IT Production world, incidents, problems and dysfunctions are “normal life”. It may seem odd, strange or even weird for normal people, but for IT Production teams, when something’s running OK for more than half an hour, a sudden state of anguish arises while suspicion grows. We immediately need to check what’s going wrong… Err… Right.

True, many IT organisation models are built not to get things running, but to fix what’s not running. Thus, we put the emphasis on “incidents managements”, not on “production management”.

There’s a long way to go, on the never ending (and steep) road of processes improvement…

While on the road, why don’t you get yourself a real job? :)

Management for Dummies: Motivate your troops!

IT is one of the world’s most difficult management environment. Perhaps just behind hospitals and Delta Forces. IT Teams are a bunch of young geeks who cannot do the same thing twice, old mainframe techies who “always did things that way”, self-proclaimed experts of obscure languages and freshly graduated long-toothed crooks.

IT management operates with strenuous budgets. The clients (real people with real people) want to control their IT budgets. The golden era of neverending budgets is over, gone with the first internet bubble in 2000. Now, they want some bang for the buck, and don’t want to spend a dollar more for IT, while their demands on IT explodes.

Thus, it is often hard to motivate the “troops”, within changing organisations, pressure, norms, incidents, angry users, weird changes, loopholes, complex processes and ever evolving technologies.

Managers must animate their teams. But not like puppets. To get the most of people while preserving a happy mood for work is a hard thing to do… Motivation does not comes free.

“Want to get heard? Speak slowly and carry a big stick” (Theodore Roosevelt).

Times of Crisis : communicate on simple measures!

Sometimes, there is a true crisis: not an “IT crisis” coming from some weird incident in the batch process. A real crisis, coming from the real people who have a real job: the “business”. Often, there is a direct impact on the IT Production. As the dependence on IT is more and more important for all fields of economic activity (from industry to insurance, through banks and even agriculture), IT teams need to react quickly to alleviate the pain of the crisis, to fill the gaps, to hold the line… We are the new rank and file soldiers of the 21st century conflicts.

Sometimes, we are a bit bewildered by what might seem to be some kind of overreaction or under reaction from the IT and Business management, who often push odd changes quickly. Anyway, this is always good for at least one thing: communication to the investor and public. They will have the feeling that IT teams are doing something against that blasted crisis that threatens their profits. And since neither the public nor the investor are usually proficient in IT complex issues, it is often more useful, while you really check what’s wrong, to announce simple measures that can be understood by everybody.

That’s the art of crisis communication: positive and simple, yet efficient.

Never forget one thing, though: good crisis communication never fixed any crisis issue. It only gives you some time, at best.

Man in the loop: The Flawless Computer

When coping with complex problems and sensible data, it is sometimes difficult to advert dangerous errors and losses.

Fortunately, there is always the “Technical Innovation paradigm”: no matter what the problem is, somebody will come with a technical solution. Even (particularly?) if the problem is not a technical issue.

While it would be more sound and sane to dig up the process, to optimize the workflow and to improve the way we work, we often run into the next technical innovation, aptly sold by a brilliant consultant.

Thus, the level of entropy increases, as the everlasting problem is handled by more complex technical platforms which, like anything else, have their own unsettled issues.

However, in the mind of most investors, managers and even clients, the computer is still a “flawless solution” in regard to the “error prone man in the loop”. They just forget one thing: computers are designed by humans. Choosing a computer to perform a task is just a way to shift the source of errors from the man who was in charge to the man who conceived the computer.

Errors still happen, and there is still room for improvement, process tuning, procedures enhancement… And even sound and well-thought technical innovation, sometimes…

Incidents Management : No Solution?

Amongst the many golden rules of incidents management, there is one that must be kept in mind everyday, everywhere, at any time : « If there is no solution, there is no problem ».

Thus, is something happens that YOU cannot solve, then, it is not YOUR business. You MUST call somebody else as soon as possible (the ASAP paradigm, as usual). There is no shame to call for help if you cannot fix it!

As an addendum to this golden rule, there is always something that you can do in the meanwhile, to keep the initiative, communicate with your clients, furnishers and hierarchy, and still pretend to lead the resolution of that blasted incident: create a Task Force.

To create an optimum Task Force you must:

- Pile a dozen of telephones on a table, even if they are not plugged (pretend to lead a “wireless IP phone solution”),

- order some twenty pizzas (and eat them cold),

- brew pots of coffee (and drink it cold),

- remove all neckties,

- print big “Task Force 1” on A4 papers, and stick some on the doors of all offices (and the lavatories).

- stick on the walls many complex (yet meaningless) charts, diagrams and listings, and use a red pencil to underline the must “relevant” parts,

- get a paperboard, and jot raw ideas on it,

- stick Post-It(TM) everywhere,

- call the people of the Communication, so they can take a picture of your Task Force, and publish a paper in the next internal newsletter.

Thus, you can send this picture of your Task Force (preferably from the Blackberry of your team manager) to all your clients, furnishers, partners, top managers, and so on…

Everybody will be sure that YOU are in charge, fully committed to solve this problem. Even if you don’t get a shit on it.

And remember… It there is no solution, there is no problem…

Project Management: Blame it on the other one!

As we discussed last week, Project Management is often a synonym of « deep space tunnel to far away galaxies », where ideas tend to drawn in the warp.

The people behind, the Project Managers, are spread between two contradictory trends: to give the feeling that they work hard, while nothing happens on their project.

Thus comes the next logical step: finding third-party scapegoats to explain why the project is lagging eons behind schedules while everybody is committed, sleeves-up, round the clock, seven days a week.

What’s wonderful with IT Production is that there is ALWAYS a third party to blame. Since you cannot invite everybody in project meetings, you can always shift the burden one somebody who cannot defend himself.

Project Management is a wonderful world, for people who can’t get themselves a real job (like, say, programming or system engineering)…

Blogging: Shit Happens

A throng of fans (ok... two of them) noted that there were no post on this blog yesterday... Sometimes, shit happens...

See you Monday! Let's pray the Helpdesk God! Let's sacrifice young virgins to Yog Sottoth!