Work Restarts

Work has been full of changes lately. None of which have involved reducing the amount of bureaucracy and paperwork I have to do. I raised a Change Request just today for a customer who pays thousands of dollars a year for server support for no reason, apparently, as they know how to do everything themselves.

The customer wanted to schedule a system reboot for this evening to improve the performance of their Java applications and I agreed to supervise it. I created the record and added the client's justification to the 'justification' field and the work plan 'restart windows, confirm services are running' to the work plan.
In the 'Backout Plan' field I wrote 'server reboot, impossible to backout'.

Normally this would be duly accepted by the posse of change approvers, but there is a new Change Manager in town today and they told me that my backout plan was not acceptable and they would not approve until I fixed it. I mentioned that nothing was being moved, deleted or changed and there was nothing we could therefore undo in the event of problems. I was then asked what happens if the server suffers a hardware failure after the restart. I tried to explain that it would be the same thing as if there was a major hardware failure right now or any other time outside the change window.

This still wasn't good enough; in order to finally gain approval I changed the backout duration from 0 minutes to 30 minutes and changed the record as such:

Restart Windows Server
Time: 7pm 29/6/2011
Work Plan: Reboot Windows. Confirm services are running after boot.
Backout Plan: In event of errors, un-reboot server.

Fortunately for me everything went smoothly.