I'm a Unix administrator *and* a diplomat!

Yesterday was not a pretty day at the office. I have had --and will have-- worse, but it was ugly.

One of my high profile projects is to roll out a series of patches onto our Solaris 8 servers, over machines in all. Determining priorities of machines and environments, suitable maintenance windows and negotiating with all of the points-of-contact and principals involved is a full-time job in itself. We began the roll out in July and are now coming up on the October 31 deadline.

My schedule initially was very ambitious, planning for completion by mid-October. With a project this complex, I wanted plenty of slack time to cover unexpected issues, complications, etc.. However, because the work ticket approval process is byzantine and burdensome with multiple points of failure, a handful of tickets were lost in the system by the powers-that-be during the review process. Yesterday's fun was rescuing the tickets from oblivion, forcing them manually through an expedited review process and persuading all of those involved that it is worth the effort rather than simply rescheduling them past our end-of-month deadline. In two incidents, I had to exchange support for my tickets for support for two others being pushed by another team.

It took all day, multiple short meetings and a vast number of telephone calls, but the work was successful, culminating in a victorious report on the 8:45 AM conference call. My schedule still holds and the deadline will be met, at least for now. So why do I feel more like a hostage negotiator than a Unix administrator?

I really don't want to go through this again, so today's exercise is ensuring that not a single work ticket left on this project (there are still 27 to process) makes it through the normal process before October 31. Pray for me. :-^

I'm a Unix administrator *and* a diplomat!

Yesterday was not a pretty day at the office. I have had --and will have-- worse, but it was ugly.

One of my high profile projects is to roll out a series of patches onto our Solaris 8 servers, over machines in all. Determining priorities of machines and environments, suitable maintenance windows and negotiating with all of the points-of-contact and principals involved is a full-time job in itself. We began the roll out in July and are now coming up on the October 31 deadline.

My schedule initially was very ambitious, planning for completion by mid-October. With a project this complex, I wanted plenty of slack time to cover unexpected issues, complications, etc.. However, because the work ticket approval process is byzantine and burdensome with multiple points of failure, a handful of tickets were lost in the system by the powers-that-be during the review process. Yesterday's fun was rescuing the tickets from oblivion, forcing them manually through an expedited review process and persuading all of those involved that it is worth the effort rather than simply rescheduling them past our end-of-month deadline. In two incidents, I had to exchange support for my tickets for support for two others being pushed by another team.

It took all day, multiple short meetings and a vast number of telephone calls, but the work was successful, culminating in a victorious report on the 8:45 AM conference call. My schedule still holds and the deadline will be met, at least for now. So why do I feel more like a hostage negotiator than a Unix administrator?

I really don't want to go through this again, so today's exercise is ensuring that not a single work ticket left on this project (there are still 27 to process) makes it through the normal process before October 31. Pray for me. :-^