Thursday, August 30, 2012

Emergency Change - Rant of the Week

It is always fun to get emergency changes and sometimes they leave you shaking your head.

Emergency Change Reason: Classroom switches to be replaced that are currently not in use, but will be when school starts.

Background: To proactively replace old switches with the potential of dying and causing an unplanned outage.

I am not sure this rises to the level of an emergency, but lets consider it for a moment. The first thing is the "Emergency Reason" and while it is great that the switches are not in use, it does not really say why this is an emergency. That is alright, lets read further and see if the "Background" indicates what could be happening. No, not much in the "Background" section other than replacing old switches.

These types of change requests need more information for the CAB to make any sort of realistic decision. Of course, then the CAB is perceived as being nit-picky, but seriously.

I am not advocating lying to the CAB, but at least make it sound like an emergency. Perhaps the switches are throwing errors or maybe they are physically falling out of the racks. Who knows! The point is that the CAB needs to help educate people on what they need without being perceived as being nit-picky or overbearing. I find myself using up a lot of my banked "goodwill" with my peers over CAB issues. Looks like I should start investing in doughnuts and coffee to help replenish!


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