What are you looking for as being 'timely'? I've seen that term applied to a
couple weeks between submission and implementation and at other times, hours
beween submission and impelmentation wasn't considered good enough :-)
Personally, I believe the most important thing is that whatever process you have
is predictable. A longer time that is predictable is going to be more acceptable
than an unpredicatable time, even if you usually are far faster. I've seen
people happier with a predictable schedule that took 3-4 days than an
unpredicatable schedule that normally took 1-2 days.
Define a fixed review schedule for requests (daily, twice a week, weekly,
whatever) and make sure you stick to that schedule and have a fixed time after
the review to implement the change. make sure that everyone knows that you meet
'monday and wednesday at 11am' and if they miss that time it needs to be a real
emergancy to get implemented before the next window.
if you were dealing with a site where the changes are driven by product
releases, I would go for a less frequent schedule (twice a week or weekly) on
the basis that they should know well in advance what they need.
If you are talking about corporate type networks full of users trying to get out
to the Internet, I would look at a daily schedule.
Try and have the request form that they send to you (or ticket) ask for
everything that you need so that you don't have to go back to them. If you have
a daily schedule, you should be willing to bounce a request back for correction
and review the next day if anything is wrong. This lets you keep your reviews
quick and predictable. If you have time to reach out and correct a ticket, fine.
But doing that too much takes away your time from other people's requests, so
you should be able to train people to submit things with full explinations or
get them bounced back.
If you have some people who tend to have standard requests, consider a custom
form that pre-fills as much as possible.
don't ask them to submit data they don't know (don't ask for source IP
addresses, ask what office they are in and if this needs to be open only from
that office or from all offices, or have the ticket system show what IP they are
submitting it from and ask if they need it from just their PC, from their
office, or from all offices, etc)
Have all review questions and implementation times update the ticket so that the
requester can see what's happening and isn't trying to call you to ask. Make the
implementation process update the ticket and notify the requester so that you
don't spend time sending notifications.
David Lang
On Sat, 22 Aug 2015, john boris wrote:
David
I am looking for the process people may have used to handle the requests so
they are timely.
On Saturday, August 22, 2015, David Lang <da...@lang.hm> wrote:
On Fri, 21 Aug 2015, john boris wrote:
Here at $WORK we have a distributed Web Filtering system. We have just
started looking to streamline the process. I figured that other large
school districts have done this already or attempted it so I will ask
here.
We have 18 High Schools and 140 Elementary schools. The Filtering is local
but managed Centrally. I am part of the team that handle the management of
the firewalls/filtering. I know we need a way top accept the request,
review it and then affect the change to the system whether it is a local
change or one that has to be global among the group.
I know there are configuration management tools to handle the changes but
I
am looking for people that have done this and see their process.
I am investigating using RT as the mechanism to handle the requests for a
number of reasons but I am willing to look at other solutions. But as this
is a private school district and our Budget year just started I have to
look at Free solutions at the start and then if we have to spend $$$ it
would be moved to next year. I figured a VM could be spun up to handle
this
as it should not be that resource intense
I can be contacted this off list if preferred. I will summarize things for
the group when finished.
TIA
John Boris
A lonely Sysadmin trying to stay afloat.
are you looking for a configuration management tool to implement the
change, a workflow tool to handle the request/approval of the change, or
what.
You say you are using rt for request processing, what are you using for
config management if anything?
what sort of web filtering system are you using? many of them have their
own management tools.
David Lang
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