Who should take responsibility of comms for an outage?

[MrDon]

Brief -
I am taking responsibility in setting up a definate Change Management team in the company I am in and I need assistance in clarifying a grey area with my client. The company I work for is an IT solutions company.

What I need to know is when a server outage is scheduled, who should take responsibility for getting an outage message to the affected userbase? The helpdesk (my company) or the client (as afterall, its their employees who are affected - we are only doing the change).

All help is much appreciated. Thanks.

The Don.

[m_croon]

I'd say if they are willing to pay for it as an extra service, your company can do this. If not, simply state that you will inform one party at the clients' (at their pick, for instance an information officer (might be too operational), client's helpdesk etc.).

[Guerino1]

Hello MrDon,

An effective solution that we encounter regularly is that Service Delivery acts as the comm group to end-users. Change Management coordinates and communicates Changes to the SD teams and the SD teams control communications out to their impacted end-user communities. This is usually because they know best as to whether or not any specific changes will impact the Product(s) and/or Service(s) they support and because they are typically in constant communications with their independent business users/clients. To ensure consistent and controlled communications, many enterprises "only" allow the SD teams to have operational communications out to such end-user communities. This helps to avoid miscommunications and conflicting information.

I hope this helps.

Regards,
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[Edited by Admin to remove link]

[Ed]

Hi MrDon

I also work for a Solutions Provider, and we interact with our Customers' Change Systems in the following ways.

1) In the situation, that we are need to take down a customer's server, or one of our servers that they have rented space on, we provide the detail to our customer's FSoC via their Change Manager, which they then publish to their affected users, and also give their approval/disapproval for the action.

2) If their support teams are taking down one of their servers then they provide us with the detail, which we put into our FSoC and publish to our affected users.

We share all Change Details with our Customers Change Teams and they with us. So I as Change Manager get to see details of ALL their Changes, and they get to see all of the Changes we do on their behalf.

If our customer does not have a Change Management System, then things become a little more difficult. in this situation we ask for a designated person to act as an information recipient (for the life of the contract) that we can feed this type of info into. This person then publishes the detail to their affected groups. The approval/disapproval situation applies here also as you would expect, but they tend not to be as interested in seeing ALL the changes, but are more selective.

I hope this helps

Regards

Ed

[MrDon]

Thanks to all that replied - you have helped.

But as one post said - if they are willing to pay for the service, then we should supply it. This is something I will have to take up with the boss. It seems it is a very grey area.