Anticlue

Production Changes on a Friday

I think there needs to be a golden rule in IT, basically to have a day of the week chosen for production changes being released into the environment. Or at the very least, a day when changes should not be released.

A golden rule should be not to place changes into production on a friday or before a long weekend. Also not to place significant changes into production before a key participants vacation.

Key exceptions, implementing a brand new major system, like hospital registration. Do it on a Saturday, and have everyone available to support it onsite.

Last friday, a vendor dropped by to say hi, and examine a couple of issues. My teammate had been working on these operational issues for a while, and the business is still able to function.

So as I'm coming back to my cube, I see my teammate and the vendor heading off to the computer room to implement a new system upgrade. So I take the opportunity to stop the unscheduled upgrade, and enlighten the vendor on our change management policy. Later on I review the same policy with my teammate again.

It is a pretty good policy. Basically all of the application it groups leads get together on Friday morning from 9:00 - 9:30 am. We review the changes going into production to ensure that several factors are covered. Customer acceptance has been completed. The customer community and technology has had the change communitcated. The change was tested with this plan. We can back it out if necessary and here is how. There are people available for support if there are problems. The beauty of group meeting is that everyone hears what is moving into production and when. If you are under the impression that there may be a ripple effect, one can voice the concerns before the ripple effect hits, instead of being paged while on the way to the boat Saturday afternoon.