Was having a conversation with Chris, he’d popped around to collect his compaq evo laptop, he was having all sorts of problems with it, lost his patience and I said I’d fix it for him – reminded me of the olden days, i still have one for on-call anyway.
He mentioned that one of his friends was very against supporting the follow the sun approach for two reasons, firstly that the regional teams had different standards, that he didn’t want New York guys playing with his servers, and secondly that it was the first step to outsourcing. I asked Chris if his friend might need a reboot, and told him my thoughts, we’ll go over his shortly.
Let’s go over the first issue: “Regional teams have different standards, I don’t want a New York guy on my server”
Ok, first of all, its a server, not your desk, your house, move on, it’s not your server, it’s owned by YOUR organization, it’s to put it nicely a piece of tin to enable the business teams/organization to earn revenue. The regional teams differences in the way they build, deploy and support a server is what drives the business teams nuts, the fact that in London I can ask for a blade server to be deployed and it’s done in 2 hours, in Tokyo or New York its two business days, because one team installs windows, another configures it, then the application team test it.
You don’t want a New York guy on your server, isn’t this the opportunity to build a relationship, to load balance the workload, to work out a strategic way forward, how we for example build servers, how they are supported, what firmware is installed etc, so that when I ask for a server in New York it doesn’t ASR because it doesn’t have the firmware HP announced two years ago, and London deployed as standard since then?
In terms of access rights, giving access to New York doesn’t mean they all need to be system admins, power users might give them 90% of the rights they’d need to support the infrastructure and avoid you getting called at 3am to press restart service.
Let’s go over the second issue: “It’s the first step to outsourcing”
Outsourcing is a cost of doing business, and a possible reality, but just because I’m getting regions to cover support, doesn’t mean that your company is going to have all support down by someone in another country. The reality of the situation is that most enterprise organizations will want their engineers on site during the business day when they’re needed, let me put it to you this way, why call an engineer out at 3am to press restart, have him in tired and emotional, plus pay him possibly hundreds of pounds for the privilege the joy of disrupting his sleep, when I can have the first line or even the second line activities handled by a region where I’ve got engineers in anyway working on the same task?
Chris had an interesting customer focused approach:
“The decision is being made regardless, and besides if I can avoid the simple stuff, it sounds great.”
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Blog videos