Supplier event management

[milligna]

Hi Brainstrust!

I've been working with an IT organisation who has a third party supplier of a critical infrastructure service which is used in turn to provide a critical service to the business. The supplier has a process in place for providing notifications of both planned and unplanned events affecting their service. The IT org has right of veto/approval in the third party owned change process (which is fine) but I can't quite figure out which internal itil aligned process this knowledge should be funnelled through.

Event management fits the unplanned outage events - no problems there, but for the planned outages - should they be handled via event Management or change Management? Does it make sense for the effort of managing forward schedule calendars etc to be duplicated in the IT change management process as well as the customer process? Or do we need to "roll our own" sort of Event Management practices for the planned outage notifications?

I would love to hear your thoughts.

[Diarmid]

This has been thrashed out before somewhere in the forum.

In simple terms a planned outage is a scheduled operational action, just like a backup or a system closedown. If you cannot restrict such outages to agreed maintenance slots, then you have work to do in agreeing them with your customers when they are proposed, but essentially they are a scheduling issue.

An outage is never a change in a meaningful way (although rescheduling a planned outage is a change in every meaningful way). Even if the reason for the outage is to apply a change, the outage itself is not a change.

I'm not sure about the concept of notification and approval of unplanned events. If you get early warning of something that was not meant to happen, then it is unlikely to be avoidable, and so approval is moot.
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"Method goes far to prevent trouble in business: for it makes the task easy, hinders confusion, saves abundance of time, and instructs those that have business depending, both what to do and what to hope."
William Penn 1644-1718

[milligna]

This particular organisation is a life or death organisation, so no matter how well planned the outage is, the business gets to say yay or nay to an outage imediately before and even during the outage depending on the business risk. (for this particular service, cancelling an outage is possible most of the time apparently).

My concern is how to set up a process mechanism for allowing the interface between the business and the supplier for the "go/no-go" point immediately before the outage.

[Diarmid]

This is totally a business process that you require.

1. When the outage is first planned and approved, the appropriate business authority is clearly appraised of the value of the outage (benefits to be accrued, costs, costs of delays, actual impact on service/s, point at which proceeding becomes quicker than regressing etc.)

2. This business authority is the final sign-off before pulling the plug and is provided access to operational manager involved throughout. (so scheduling of outage includes scheduling availability of business sign-off authority.

I.e. your mechanism is formal sign-off process and open communications channel.
_________________
"Method goes far to prevent trouble in business: for it makes the task easy, hinders confusion, saves abundance of time, and instructs those that have business depending, both what to do and what to hope."
William Penn 1644-1718