This is my first stab at drafting a recommendation to take to the full committee. Please feel free to provide feedback directly to me or through the comments field on this wiki.

William Dougherty

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Scheduling and Announcing Maintenance Subcommittee: Recommendation

Draft #1 08/17/07 

  • A single, comprehensive events calendar should be established for all central I.T. services.
    • This calendar will be used to:
      • Schedule events
      • Document the event both for advanced notice and historical purposes
      • Notify administrators, stakeholders, and users of planned events
    • This calendar will serve as a resource for planning necessary maintenance, coordinating events that may overlap, and ensuring events than may not overlap are not scheduled simultaneously. If an event is not recorded on this calendar, it should not be undertaken except in emergency situations. 
  • A coordination committee should be appointed with representation from all I.T. administrative areas.
    • This committee will meet regularly to:
      • Review scheduled events
      • Resolve conflicts in scheduling if and when they arise
      • Provide input regarding content and audience for announcements regarding scheduled maintenance activities
    • This committee will not supplant existing technical and advisory committees. It will instead supplement other groups' activities with a focus on ensuring maintenance activities are properly coordinated, announced, and documented.
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3 Comments

  1. Morgan W Allen

    Aug 19, 2007

    looks good.  does this recommendation need to define what events are being considered and scheduled? i can't remember if thats covered in the scope of another groups work or not.

  2. William Dougherty II

    Aug 21, 2007

    I believe that we should discuss the topic Morgan raises somewhat further.

    -Certainly all events, no matter how minor or seemingly low impact, will be scheduled. Part of the recommendation above would (I hope) convey that these events *should* be placed on the calendar, regardless of their potential impact. In this way, we would hope to avoid several minor events being scheduled simultaenously with no one the wiser. Several minor events scheduled without some awareness *could* become a more major event, especially if they all encountered some difficulty.

    -The second part of the recommendation would cover the discussion/resolution phase, if and when several events were scheduled for the same day/time.

    -From that perspective, I would argue that all events should be considered as they will all have to be scheduled.

    -We also discussed some need for approvals on some of this. Should that be part of the recommendation or should we hold off on that for a guidelines/procedural document?

  3. Unknown User (rsprague)

    Aug 22, 2007

    I like the idea of defining and getting a first pass process going ASAP. As such, I think we can postpone the task of what exactly gets posted and who exactly gets notified. Let's all do what we think is best in a spirit of collaboration now and make it better as we go along. I definitely want to avoid getting bogged in details.