Who approved that change?

I was speaking with Chris, he called me asking for advice, and the following conversation resulted:

“ow would you deal with this? A team approved a change which resulted in their server being rebooted, their application didn’t start as a result causing disruption to service on Monday morning and they’re getting emotional and wanting to ask how I’m going to fix it.

It’s a difficult one, the person approving the change you could argue takes liability for any issues of that change, the person doing the work should check if there are any processes that need restarted, the application team should check their application afterwards, however in this case this hasn’t happened, either due to the change not highlighting a reboot was to occur, that the person doing the work wasn’t aware of the documentation/processes to check the application afterwards, or the application team didn’t think a reboot was going to happen and logged on to check their processes.

The first thing I’d do is call the person who approved it, the application team/business line, have a chat with them, understand the impact, understand where they’re going, in the respect that if we’re going to be emotional then I’ll need to understand the chain of events, the responsibilities involved, but before all this, I’d try and reboot the conversation, in the following respect, by saying something like “A reboot happened as part of change 90873, this was approved by the .. team, we will update our processes and documentation to limit this happening again, I’m happy to discuss this, but life really is too short, let’s move on.” Phrase it in the right way though.

This is not to suggest, I’m lacking in interest. It’s simply the following, there was a break down in communication, in process, now obviously IT need to work on improving this, but debating it, who did what steps leading to the loss of service adds little benefit to the end user, to service delivery. In the time spent doing the accountability work, we could have rebuilt the servers, we could have upgraded the application code, defragmented the file system to improve performance, anything that’s more productive from and end user perspective. I’m all for discusssion, for accountability, but when it’s of value to process, to service delivery or the business teams - how you approach this will depend on you and your business.