With the development of the company's business, the demand for it is increasing, and the number of system changes is increasing. In the past three years, the annual growth rate of team changes has reached more than 50%, but it is impossible for the number of teams to grow at such a high rate every year. At the same time, because the system is getting bigger and bigger and the integration between systems is complicated, people have higher and higher requirements for the quality of change, because a seemingly simple change may affect multiple IT systems. In view of this, the demand for automation in the reform is getting stronger and stronger.
The simple change process is that the applicant submits the change, the change administrator reviews the standardization of the change plan, and the change approver reviews the rationality of the plan. If the change has a great impact, the decision of the review Committee needs to be changed. After passing the review, the change administrator communicates with the change applicant, schedules the change, and the change implementer implements the change. If there is any abnormality in the implementation, it will be changed and upgraded according to the abnormal change process. After the implementation is completed, feedback the change results and notify the change applicant to organize the change verification. If the applicant fails to verify, the change implementer will be notified to roll back the change. After the change is completed, the applicant will feedback the implementation results of the change. Finally, the change manager will close the changes and track the failed changes.
The content of the above change process seems simple, but there will be many problems in dealing with the change process. Let's see how the quality problems caused by these problems can be avoided by automated methods.
1, the quality of the change scheme is low.
Many project teams frequently change people, and new change applicants don't know how to write the change plan because the work handover is not in place. Although most change schemes are supported by change templates, there are still various problems in getting an inexperienced newcomer to submit changes, such as the lack of non-standard steps for changes. Some schemes are written according to their own intuitive imagination, and there is no implementation template at all. For this kind of problem, by changing the structure of the scheme, the applicant can choose to change the standard steps one by one, integrate a scheme, or directly apply the latest related change as a new change template, and submit it with a little modification. The automation of change plan greatly improves the accuracy and standardization of change plan.
2. Change the conflict.
Because change managers are used to manual communication and scheduling, many change schemes can only find change conflicts when each change manager summarizes the change plan. Manual proofreading is easy to miss or read Excel content. Changes have a great impact on the production environment. For example, one system's OS has been patched and upgraded, but another system is still in the process of version online, and the OS was restarted when the application was originally deployed. This is extremely destructive for critical systems with high time window requirements. Through change automation, changes that affect each other can be identified intuitively when submitting corresponding system changes, so as to avoid change conflicts.
3, change the examination and approval is not convenient.
In the past, change plans could only be processed on computers. For example, in the past, there were often some changes that needed to be revised repeatedly because of scheme problems, and the change administrator had to wait in the company all the time. With the increase of change business, this waiting situation has become more and more serious. The change administrator is troubled by this, and the mobile approval will save the change administrator from this scenario. Changes can be approved at any time and any place.
4. Change the problem of waiting in line.
The previous change queuing phenomenon is the most troublesome problem, because there are many changes, a person's name has many changes, which often leads to changes in the project team, and it often takes several times to wait until the changes are implemented. The emergence of deployment automation has greatly improved this problem.
We always believe that the implementation of changes must wait until the business system is the least busy. Most systems are used on weekdays, so in order to reduce the impact on global business, the time window for most system changes will be selected at 22 o'clock on Saturday night and last until 8 o'clock on the weekend morning. I have been with change for a long time and feel it is natural to do so. Actually, it is not. Who said that change must be kept on Saturday night? Through change automation and change operation management, the change quality of the changed system can be effectively controlled. For example, a system has been proved many times that it can successfully complete the automation of changes within 65,438+00 minutes. Then, through the high availability of the architecture and the platform of change automation tools, the change will surely reach the height of implementation anytime and anywhere. By then, no amount of change will be a problem.