Wireless Web Require CM Review?

[Phoenix]

All,

We are implementing a new wireless network at our headquarters office. I requested to have this process go through CM and basically was told in our IT project review meeting by a few directors that they disagreed and that it will not go through the CM process.

I would appreciate feedback from more seasoned CM folks on this please. What is your opinion please? This would be the implementation of a new wireless network company wide at our headquarters.

Thanks!

[Ed]

Hi Phoenix

As far as I am concerned, a Change is a Change! Something like this which, if it goes wrong leaves people without access to the system, absolutely must go through the Change Management process.

I appreciate the position of being overridden by your directors, but what would they say if it was their access being compromised. The impact to the availability of the system could be immense. I would be shouting and screaming on this one. You could remind them of the potential losses to the business that will affect the bottom line.

I really do sympathise - this is rubbish!

Regards

Ed

[jpgilles]

This is exactly what, in my mind, Change Management is made for: those operations that the tech guys present as "normal, "basic" , "without compexity" , "controlled", a.s.o. and that can potentially generate disasters in terms of availability and / or performances !

Shout! Shout!

and ask one of those directors to sign a paper where he/she takes the responsability for all the possible consequences.
_________________
JP Gilles

[ARoll]

That's an unfortunate situation, as stated above it is a change and it NEEDS to go through the CM process. Typically in the project type reviews, least from my experience, what is more so reviewed is the schedules, budgeting, scope, etc, more so the highler level items and not so much the technical details. Start to pose the types of questions that would be answered typically through your CM process and see what answers you receive to help demonstrate the need to go through the process:

Service Desk:
Has support documentation, training and troubleshooting been conveyed to the service desk?
Will there be proper staffing for the initial roll out to handle the increase of service requests and incidents? (They'll say there won't be an increase, but we do live in reality)

Testing:
Has proper load testing been performed on the network to handle the proposed load?
Have Intrusion detection/prevention steps been performed to ensure the right ACL's are in place?

Rollback:
In the event of degraded performance on eithre the wireless or wired network, has a rollback plan been generated?
Pending issues with implementation, have check points with Go/no go been determined?

The above are just a few things that myself would typically want to see answered as it traversed the process so it as at least a stepping stone.

Additionally you will want to take a pure process approach in trying to reason with the directors to why this particular implmentation is above the process. need to communicate very clearly that this sets a precendence(kinda in a legal sense) that certain teams or efforts are above the rules and this essentially will kill the process and work that you have put in place to gain control of your environment. Its an unfortunate first step down the path to the darkside Also inline with what Jpgiles stated, if a director is trumping CM authority, you will want to document this and have a sign off from the directors accepting accountability and authority.
_________________
Adam
Practitioner - Release and Control
Blue Badge

"Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement requires a change"

[Phoenix]

thanks to everyone who has responded. this is extremely helpful for me.