Midwest IT Survival

For both IT managers and engineers alike, it is the least desired activity following a system failure of some kind, coming up with the root cause.  Business and/or product owners outside of IT are waiting, after the dust settles and the system is restored to working condition, to have primarily two questions answered:

1. Why how did the system go down in the first place?
2. What is IT going to do to make sure this doesn’t happen again?

Fix ASAP, but don't miss the how and why?

The need for answers to these two seemingly straight forward questions generates an urgency that has all the IT stakeholders rallying together in camps.  This series of articles look at this challenging exercise from an engineering management perspective with the first article introducing the “80% accurate technique” and previous article focusing on communication strategies with your management when the priority of the organization is restore service at all costs, then try to find the root cause.  This article considers a less “at all costs” culture.”

1. What is the priority of the organization when it comes to systems outages?

Is the priority to restore services as fast a humanly possible, but with attention paid to what changes are being made, when and what are we learning about the system along the way?  If so, you need a two pronged approach:

Prong One – Keep Your Team Focused

Taking a quick assessment of your team members, you can probably quickly determine who can successfully balance competing priorities and who is overwhelmed when multiple goals are up in the air at the same time.  For those that have proven the ability to successfully balance these competing priorities, minor reminding to be cognizant of the need to balance the urgency to get things fixed against the need to capture the high level steps taken both towards ultimate success as well as towards knowledge that ultimately leads to success.  Overly reminding these individuals of these goals will be perceived as micro managing.  Thus, politely remind them, then proceed to monitor without nagging.  For those that have proven to struggle with the “troubleshooting 101” concepts of value derived from both fixing the problem quickly and gathering knowledge during the fixing process, you will need to get more involved.  One approach is to link these individuals to more senior team members that can take the lead and leverage these less skilled resources as a personal support arm to their resolution efforts.  If you are unable to link these individuals to ones that do possess these skills, you will need to provide further instruction.  Here, what skilled team members would view as micromanaging is what these team members would view as helpful, clear and focused direction.  Consider a quick electronic template for individuals to use with columns such as:

Date/Time, Activity Performed, Knowledge/Result of Activity, By Your or Other?

Example entries:

10/01/2009 8:00am, Joined troubleshooting conference call, nothing yet, <Team Member Name Here>

10/01/2009 8:10am, Restarted BLAH service, no change for the system still crashed under load, <Team Member Name Here>

10/01/2009 8:15am, Increased Available Threads in Thread Pool and Restarted BLAH service, no change for the system still crashed under load but the system supported 10k more users than before this change, <Team Member Name Here>

Also, consider pre-populating the template with other relevant data such as a drop down list of business units impacted or applications/services involved or other support groups involved.  Include as many pre-populate-able attributes as needed to assist you in strategizing your communications.

Prong Two – Keep Your Management Team Informed

If you feel some what tactically helpless, image your management’s level of helplessness in these situations.  If you are new to your management role, this is a great opportunity to demonstrate your leadership capabilities and build confidence and trust in you from your management.  Structuring a communication frequency that provides timely, but not thrashing, updates of major milestones in the troubleshooting and root cause effort will go along way to build that confidence and trust.  A theme sequence to consider is:

• Reported problem, your team’s initial engagement (don’t forget to mention the urgency of your team’s involvement), other teams engaged, more details forthcoming
• Quickly following, initial assessment of the systems and end users impacted, what they are experiencing, what the initial take is on what the culprit is, temperature check of the players involved, more details forthcoming
• Major milestones of knowledge discovery or change in the reported problem from the last report, confidence assessment of next steps equaling resolution and root cause
  • Consider attaching your most recent template as an appendix/supporting material
  • Final resolution, root cause with confidence assessment, degree of involvement in the cause of the problem, next steps now that service is restored
    • Consider attaching your most recent template as an appendix/supporting material

With a two pronged approach of balancing the directional needs of your team to juggle competing priorities factoring in their individual skill sets plus an organized thematic approach to communicating to your management, you add considerable value in the root cause analysis process even though your hands are not directly solving the technical issues.

In the next article in this series … what if the priority to restore services is as fast as humanly possible but under the overwhelming fear that the spinning wheel of blame has to land on someone for this disastrous event?

Anyone have an example of a do or a don’t when it comes to how you handle these situations?  Anything you did that was helpful or hurtful during these events you can share?