Normally, the first step in a project is to complete a
Gap Analysis and for this you need to interview and interact with a company’s
IT staff and management.
You need to use a variety of interview questions and
assessment checklists and I’ve developed these over time to identify the good
and bad in current practice. From there,
I interview management to determine a profile of good practice for Capacity
Management that the organization would like to achieve. At this point, I would take the two views –
current and desired – and then compare this with my understanding of good
practice and determine which pieces of this would be a good fit for the
organization.
While this normally happens as part of the project
itself, I quickly identified that I would need to conduct a good portion of my
Gap Analysis prior to the formal beginning of this project(see my blog, ‘Sometimes
in the real world you can’t do things by the book’, if you haven’t been keeping
up)
Setting and executing a plan
I needed to do this for two reasons:
·
I knew that we would need to deliver results in 3
months from the formal start of the project.
This is not enough time to commit to delivering results, and THEN do a
detailed Gap Analysis.
·
Further, I was uncertain that we would be able to meet
the required timeframes – a Gap Analysis and a commitment to change takes time
– and what if I didn’t think we could fill the gaps quickly enough? Also, any recommended changes we needed to be
successful would need to be written into the agreement – without those changes
we would not be successful and I needed to ensure we were putting ourselves in
the best position to succeed.
So, I broke the Gap Analysis into two parts. I was most interested in whether Capacity
Management tools would need to be installed and whether there were existing
tools in place that we could leverage to help with the decisions and
recommendations that we’d have to make in less than 90 days. So, with apologies to ITIL, I decided to
worry about the tools and data first and the process itself later.
Hint: The apology to ITIL is mainly because the tools
should not (usually) drive the process – however, with only 3 months to
complete the project, it’s impossible to do a proper analysis and rollout if
you have no historical data to base your facts on.
Sometimes practical considerations have to override
the usual notion of good practice.
As I was bringing our own tool to the project (which
isn’t always the case) and installing it into the company’s production
environment, we had to prove that the tool didn’t consume excess resources and
worked as advertised. The group that did
this testing work wasn’t the group that was my immediate consumer and it took
weeks for the tool to be tested. By the
time we had the go-ahead to install the software (and the capture agents) in
the production environment our 3 months had whittled down to 2.
While the install of our capture agents and the
software took place, necessary in order to capture component level detail in
the production environment, another consultant and I interviewed over 20 teams
and captured as much information about the applications as we could. More on this soon…
Consultants were deployed to work with the company’s
staff in order to get capture agents installed on about 100 targets which included
mainframe, Unix, Linux, Windows, and VMware targets.
Part of the challenge is always to have the cooperation
of the administration staff in order to minimize the time spent installing and
configuring the capture of data. We had
full cooperation because of the sponsor/champion and much of the work was done
before we got on site. Installation and
configuration was completed in about 3-4 days.
In the meantime, we spent time interviewing the business
units, development and IT staff using checklists developed prior to the
visit.
For an idea of the type of questions you need to be
asking catch up with me again on Wednesday....in the meantime join our Community for access to white papers, webinars on-demand and more http://www.metron-athene.com/_downloads/index.html
Rich Fronheiser
Chief Marketing Officer
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