Anticlue

Managing the projects, the requests, and the operations

There is a triangle to managing the work to be done. There are the projects, those with capital dollars, the request for work from our business partners, and the work that simply needs to be done so the operation continues to function.

Operational work in an applications support view, is the required work necessary for the application to be able to function. The system data additions. The quarterly updates with the newly released governmental codes, or the software patches that are in place to fix the next big item. Over the years, as processes become more brittle, one finds additions to the pool of operational work, an addition of items that should be automated. FTP processes were just a little more knowledge could fully automate. Report generation, that could be created from a data repository and scheduled using BIRT, Crystal Enterprise, or even Crystal Reports server.

The truth of the matter, is that any operational work, needs to be examined and reviewed in the eyes of new technology. In my own personal opinion, a part of being an IT professional is to continue self-learning. However as time continues, that drive leaves some individuals. There comes a point of comfort and reliablitiy and a niche is formed. Then everything new is created in the same pattern as everything of old was, without any investigation in to doing things with fewer break points, simplifying integration, or report distribution. It takes a new set of eyes to say have you ever considered this? The benefit is that with the new consideration, a new way of automating a previous manual task may be created. And then magically time that used to be spent on operational support is transformed in to available hours for the projects and system enhancement requests. Eventually IT can even offer ideas on how to enhance a system to perform better and maybe even work at another solution never even considered.