Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Working the System

The place I'm working at outsources it's infrastructure to different IT companies.

Company A for Networks
Company B for Data Center facilities
Company C for Server \ Domain hosts.... And so on....

A very lengthy process needs to be followed to be able to get any one of these outsourcing companies to provision any task for another third party company. On most cases I go about this lengthy process. Get service requests raised. Get approvals for the change. Get resources committed to the task.

In a perfect environment, when these companies work well together everything will be ok. And everyone is happy.

But it never is.

My service request was lodged, approved and assigned 2 weeks ago. Two weeks later and it still is sitting in someone's queue waiting to be actioned.

When there are no dependencies in play, we usually just wait for them to respond.

But this change had to be actioned before my implementation this weekend... so what to do ?

I called Company C and raised a high severity case with them telling that the Production environment for a certain application wasn't working. And that we had narrowed it down to one legacy setting on the network.

In 5 minutes, I had raised enough alarm bells that got my change request completed almost immediately.

Only problem now is that I have to answer to questions on why they had never heard of this supposedly 'Production Application' prior to my phone call. crap..

No comments: