Secrets of the Kung-Fu Master

And don't forget to shave your head...

Changes Management

Well, well... It seems we're back for good, after many, many months of waiting...

I'll try to push a "change" to the CAB each week... Seems to be a more reasonable target than a daily process... :D

Welf

Frozen Zone Sneakers

A « Frozen Zone » is a well known concept of the IT Production : at some critical calendar dates, all changes will be frozen (ie : blocked, not iced) to allow a « smooth » run of some vital jobs. Typical frozen zones include the last and first days of the month, quarter and year (to allow accountancy matching, invoicing or inventory check-up for example). Some frozen zone can be declared in summer, while all the technical experts are away on vacation, or when a critical production run is performed for an usual order in a factory…

The “Frozen Zone” comes with two paradigms:

First, it’s a further proof that one of the foremost (the main?) causes of incidents are changes (many of those being corrections to previous changes).

Second, no matter what you do, you can’t change human nature (even with process consultants): some people will always try to sneak around the Frozen Zone, by obtaining derogations for THEIR changes.

Those people tend to be (according to their own opinion of course), “the only ones who’ve got a real job”…

That’s why, even in Frozen Zone, critical incidents occur, by the fault of changes…

the return of the CAB - real life experiment

People can’t help it : their changes are always either “urgent”, “most urgent”, “critical break fix” or “an emergency”. No matter how well (and how lean) you design and run your change process, there will always be a lot of “bypass” (or attempts at least). Perhaps the true solution lies elsewhere, far from our ITIL reflections. Perhaps people just have to understand and above all accept that they are not alone on earth nor the centre of thereof. There are other people around us, with equally important claims for urgent changes and swift incidents resolution.

Perhaps ITIL is about people, after all… Not about computers…

Family Life - week-ends...

Sometimes it's hard for IT Teams to "disconnect" from work at home. Particularly since the advent of emails, blackberries and secure remote accesses.

When the mind is perpetually connected to the IT Production, family life can become... Strenuous at best...

Happy week-end!

Change Management : The CAB

The « Change Advisory Board » is a board of people in charge of giving advice about the changes on the IT Production. Clear enough?

Years ago, IT Teams changed what they wanted and when they wanted on the IT Production. This often led to some “discomfort” for the end-users.

Even between IT Teams, changes were routinely mismanaged (yes: more than now sometimes): network teams changed IPs without warning, mainframe teams decided an IPL at 10:15am, DBA teams cleared tables around 04:56 pm… And the like.

One of ITIL “best practices” is to introduce this body of representative people.

Thus, the “official ITIL definition” is:

An authoritative and representative group of people who are responsible for assessing, from both a business and a technical viewpoint (wow!), all high impact Requests for Change (RFCs). They advise Change Management on the priorities of RFCs and propose allocations of resources to implement those Changes. The Change Advisory Board (CAB) will be made up of Customer (what? who?), User (gosh!) and IT representatives, and may also include, depending upon the nature of the Changes being considered, 3rd party and other administrative business representatives (argl!). The CAB is chaired by the Change Manager.

You see, real people and nerds, in the same room, trying to speak the same language. Sounds crazy, hu ?

So the IT Teams had to learn some kind of new “vernacular communication mediums” (words) to be understood by their counterparts who, in turn, tried to plunge into the abysses of IT vocabulary.

Sometimes, this leads to curious situations, with IT teams trying to “hide” a change under a somewhat curious terminology… But of course, this is always for the best reasons!