The
summary is stated as, “With ITIL and change
management, the Visible Ops framework promises a new approach to creating an
efficient IT operational model. But its chance of success is open to doubt
without changes to the way IT is procured, designed, configured, validated and
implemented.”
I was rather surprised by the author’s
perceived shortcomings in regard to the Visible Ops / ITIL Framework. Some of the reader comments were not much
better. Let’s take a look.
The author
states, “That
distinction was never more apparent than in the almost pointless weekly change
advisory board meetings. While the processes themselves were painfully
bureaucratic and often a diversion from operational work, the meetings
themselves were just strange.
With barely anyone in attendance, the board
would ask for a justification for each change, with a response of
"approve" or "rejected" even though it was clear they had
little or no grasp of the technical explanation or implication provided.”
Why the hell would you allow your change
advisory board to be scarcely attended and lacking the participation of the
folks capable of properly evaluating the change requests raised? Without a true CMDB, which few organizations
actually possess, the only folks capable of properly evaluating these changes
have all the organizational knowledge within their collective skulls. Don’t blame ITIL for your
organization’s inability to properly manage the attendance and content of
these meetings.
Or let’s try this one. The author goes on to state, “Then there was the security and risk-compliance chap
who'd lock himself in his room, glued to his Tripwire dashboard spying on any
unapproved changes. So imagine his amazement when I introduced him to VMware
and vMotion.”
So, ummm,
right. Technology progressed. Your organization failed to progress with it
by eliminating virtualization workload shifts from the activities requiring change control/change
documentation. What does this have to do
with ITIL? So the answer is
no, you really shouldn’t have to raise a change to allow vMotion to do its job –
your process was simply hosed and you almost sound amused to have been part of the problem rather than a contributor to the solution.
Last but
not least there is this gem. “Several years later, as a
technical consultant my impression of the effectiveness of the change advisory
board failed to improve. Late one night at a customer's datacentre, I'd pointed
out that they had cabled up the wrong ports and that this would require a
change to be raised.
"No need for that" replied the
SAN architect, "I'm one of the board members". He then proceeded to
pull out and swap the FC cables to his production hosts with a big grin on his
face. Several minutes later his phone rang, to which he replied, "It's OK,
I've resolved it. There was a power failure on some servers." Then he
turned to me with a wink and said, "There you go. Sorted. Lubbly
jubbly."”
This person should be coached immediately. If this was not a first time offense a
termination would be the appropriate response.
This is reckless behavior and should not be tolerated.
Well let’s not leave the readers off the
hook here. Someone named ammohunt
responded with the following (edited four spelling errors), “Where the change control piece of ITIL breaks down is determine
what is a maintenance task and what constitutes a change in our case we felt
the better judgment should have been left up to us; the technical folks.
Management disagree and decided that they would decide this...It got to the
point where my manager was insisting that i create a change control for editing
a host file. At first i started implementing tier 0; as in Null change
controls..i.e. what management doesn't know won't hurt them which quickly
earned me the cowboy label. Eventually the best solution was to give up on the
company and seek gainful employment at a company with sane process; many others
did the same.”
Well I am
sorry, ammohunt, while your technical guidance should be considered when
vetting which changes require proper approval/documentation you are not
steering the ship here. I recently
witnessed a significant downtime to an EHR system as the result of, well,
editing a hosts file. Glad to hear you
found gainful employment elsewhere - your previous employer likely gets some additional sleep knowing that current employees to do not share the cowboy mentality.
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