Third Party Scheduled Maintenance?

[TimB]

We deal with a number of third parties - they're pretty good at telling us a few days in advance of any scheduled outages, but we have no say in whether or not they actually *have* the outage.

Should this be raised as a standard change? I see no value in putting it through an approval process (since it's going to happen anyway), but it could be useful to have on an FSC, so the Service Desk can field calls about it.

[Ed]

Hi Timb

I have a similar situation, The way we cover this, as we cannot control it, is to use 'notifications' which we then post in our FSoC.

We get these suppliers to send us a 'Notification' which contains most of the info I want for an RFC

Some of our suppliers are more than happy to let us know what they are doing, but are less happy to have us control it.
Others are more amenable. We have started to add into our contracts with our suppliers that they will use our CM system, or be deemed in breach of contract.

This has actually led to some suppliers introducing CM into their companies, what a result!!!!

Regards

Ed

[Skinnera]

We also put a 'For Info' item in the FSC.

The support team with the realtionship to the 3rd party owns the Change, so they raise it and close it down afterwards.

[Benson112]

When you say third party....do you mean somebody who you pay for the service in question?

If so, i would suggest that you take the advise above and enter into your contract with them that YOU have the final say not them. We have total control over our third parties, when they inform us of scheduled maintenance, it is subject to our change process and if rejected, will not go ahead.