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Posts Tagged ‘Change Management’
Troubleshooting my Configuration Management installation
Have you ever solved a particularly nasty bug or fixed a problem while writing an email to a co-worker about the problem? Merlin Mann of 43folders has a great post describing how to Solve problems by writing a note to yourself. Basically, as Merlin says, “concentrate on coolly describing exactly what you want to accomplish as well as what happens when you try the approach that hasn’t been working for you.”
As a writer, I can identify with this way to communicate a problem because it always helps me to record my thoughts in writing. Time and time again I have stored drafts of an email to my fellow information architect about a DITA catalog issue or other such minor problems where I figured out the solution while drafting the email. Usually by removing myself from the frustration and breaking down the problem into searchable bits, I remember something critical or I discover the missing piece of information that was blocking my progress.
I’ve also read that pair programmers will position a cardboard cutout in their workspace so that they can describe a problem to the cardboard cutout in such a way that the answer reveals itself. This paper calls it a Sidebrain: a sidekick for the programmer’s brain, hee hee. We used to have an Austin Powers cardboard cutout, but he didn’t seem insightful enough for me to try this approach.
I can laugh at this tonight, but today I learned the hard way that there is a big difference between troubleshooting installing the CCM (Change and Configuration Management) solution and installing the CM (Configuration Management) product. That one little C adds a layer of complexity that I just wasn’t ready to work with today. I am installing the Configuration Management as a baby step to understanding all the interdependencies with the CCM solution. Even still, the email I wrote out trying to describe my problem about CM (while the recipient thought I was talking about CCM) helped to clarify the mystery of the extraneous C. My Google searches at BMC led me to a wonderful Diagnostic and Troubleshooting Guide that had the exact troubleshooting information I needed for why my Configuration Management Tuner won’t start, and I wanted to share it here in case it helps someone else.
Facing the Dell laptop with a Sony battery recall… can a CMDB help?
So, was your laptop affected by the recent Sony battery recall? I have a Dell Latitude D600 and had to check the serial number but fortunately the battery number did not match those on the recall website that you check to see if you need to get a new one.
Now, if a CMDB had contained the serial number of my battery, could I have been saved that extra step? It’s a question of granularity for the CMDB – when would you kick yourself for not going more granular on your CMDB? And is it possible to think of all scenarios such as this, especially for all hardware parts that go into laptops and servers and desktops? I sincerely doubt it’s worth the trouble… until something like this recall comes up and then I wonder.
It seems like entering all that information into your CMDB is not worth it for these rare exceptions when you want the information. Until the information could be automatically discovered somehow, it’s just as easy to have your end-users look it up for themselves. If the serial number information was available from the manufacturers or through discovery, it could be a federated attribute in an Asset Management database rather than stored in the CMDB. But, for a level of granularity that helps you pinpoint a subset of your entire collection of hardware, you could use the CMDB to help you determine who might be affected, based on who has laptops or who has Dell laptops with the exact model numbers that are affected. This sounds like a sensible and balanced approach.
How about you? Any ideas on the practicality of granularity for these recall situations? What is the next step — Change Management for tracking all the replaced batteries?
Updated to add: Here’s a link to a relevant podcast with Tom Bishop, where he talks about the relativity of data. Thanks to Ynema’s comment I can get even more familiar with the best approaches to these types of CMDB design questions.
Eating our own dog food, or sipping our own champagne
Eating your own dog food. The phrase comes from the early television advertising genre when people would ask, but will the dog eat the food? Today it’s categorized as a computer jargon phrase, well-documented in a Wikipedia entry, describing how software companies and other industries try out their own products, putting themselves in their customers’ shoes. I assure you that at BMC, our IT group often pops open cans of our dog food, or sips our own champagne, as Thomas Siebel prefers to call it.
My favorite essay on the topic has to be Joel Spolsky’s “What is the work of dogs in this country?” essay from 2001. Read both the Wikipedia link and the essay for all the nuances and pros and cons of eating one’s own dog food. I especially like Joel’s example of how the Juno executive wanted six pop-up ads until he experienced it himself and then backed off to two pop-up ads.
Similarly, I have heard people ask over and over again, this BSM stuff sounds great, but are you really doing it internally, BMC? That type of question is the heart of eating one’s own dog food. “Sounds great, but have you put it into practice? Show me.”
In the spirit of documenting how we eat our own dog food, I recently completed a white paper, “Implementing Resource Management Using Business Service Management Principles.” It’s about how our research and development lab schedules server resources for testing. This scheduling is no small task, especially in an Agile development environment with iterations that might go for 2 weeks or 4 weeks. The products we test also may need to be tested on 14 different platforms. I think the team used a half dozen BMC products and intend to use even more in the future, such as the advanced discovery and provisioning tools we have available. Products consumed so far, with more on the way:
- BMC Performance Manager for Databases
- BMC Performance Manager for Servers
- BMC Performance Manager Portal
- BMC Remedy Action Request System
- BMC Remedy Asset Management
- BMC Remedy Change Management
So take a look at the paper - no registration is required - and let us know what you think. This IT group, including talk.bmc’s own Steve Carl, is constantly looking forward to make their processes even more business service centered.
