The Human Element

I was busy writing a little blog post about how process and statistics can, when taken to extremes, actually make life harder...when I stumbled upon this great article by Lucid IT.

My original blog post was going to talk about the following scenario:

After upgrading a server for more memory upon powering the box back up it looks like it won't boot. The memory is removed but still nothing. It turns out that it's the hard drive, which is replaced and everything works.

however....

The change was not completed, and it ran over it's window(or was that an incident), the incident of the hard drive was not logged instantly as it was assumed that the issue was the memory. Did the change cause the HDD failure?

How to categorise this change?

Rarely will a process define the options in such detail, and as described in the article mentioned it really behooves you NOT to write a process that defines every possible outcome.

Leadership and value

Leadership and delegation of responsibilities are vital, a process is inflexible; it's the people who need to be empowered to deal with these unexpected situations.
This may sound a little scary to anyone who has spent years trying to get process in the door of an IT shop, but the bottom line is that process is supposed to be valuable. Rather than spending hours in digging in the weeds to give the perfect catagorisation it may be more valuable to just pick one and move on, a single change will not determine future IT spend after all.

Maybe the IT worker isn't superfluous afterall!