Providing Affordable IT Management to SME's Top 10 tips
To move the problem management thread forward, I thought I would include the introduction and headings from my free report “ Managing Major System Failures”
When it comes to computer systems, regardless of their size, two things are inevitable. Firstly, as time goes on, they will need upgrading. As hardware becomes faster and memory becomes cheaper, the software houses are spending large amounts of time and money to ensure that the application you bought 2 years ago is now out of date, and out of date means “unsupported”. The only way to keep on top is to upgrade! Secondly, at some point in time your computer system WILL fail. It maybe 10 minutes after you ran your last backup on your hard drive holding all of your data or in the case of my “sat nav” system, the day before a business trip of 500 miles to a place I had never been to before.
Fortunately system failures can range from “inconvenient” to “catastrophic” and most individuals can manage somewhere between 50 – 75% along this range based on life experience alone. But what happens when your system failure end up close to the catastrophic end?
Anything between anger, blind panic or indecisiveness can rear its head and this is where this report comes to hand. Written in consultation between two experienced problem managers, this team have handled everything from an outbreak of blaster potentially affecting 1200 PC’s throughout the UK, to planned upgrades that have not gone according to plan finishing with a flood and a fire in the main computer room.
The top tips in the next section are designed to provide you with additional skills to help you manage a major computer system failure where experience and blind luck are just not enough. Each of the following heading’s are expanded in the full report to give you information which has been tried and tested over many years of problem management activity.
Headings in the report:
1. Information is key
2. Deadlines help focus the mind
3. When to have a plan b
4. If needed, allow one to direct whilst another one writes
5. Conference calls
6. Don’t change anything without …
7. Trade off full service for vital business functionality
8. 18 hours is enough!
9. Blame has no place in restoring the service
10. Restoration is only half of the job
Further information on these headings can be found by email us requesting "PM1 - Managing major system failures"
3rd March 2009
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