Introduction to NonStop Operations Management

Change and Configuration Management
Introduction to NonStop Operations Management–125507
7-3
Management Responsibilities
Management Responsibilities
The change-management and configuration-management functions are most effective
when policies and procedures are developed and enforced, and the staff is trained. It is
important to:
•
Establish change-management and configuration-management policies
•
Determine who must approve changes
•
Train appropriate staff in the policies and procedures
Staffing
Your staffing needs depend on:
•
The size of your company and the number of systems and applications your
company runs. The larger the company and the greater the number of systems and
applications, the greater the number of people who must be involved in change and
configuration management. If you have a small operation, you might need to assign
only one person to change and configuration management. If you have a large
operation, you might need to assign a whole group to this function.
•
Whether you want to centralize or decentralize the tasks. If you have distributed
systems or client/server implementations, you must decide whether or not to
centralize the change-management and configuration-management functions.
Centralizing the functions allows one group of people to control change on all
systems. Decentralizing the function allows each site to handle its own changes.
No matter what the size of your company, you should assign (full-time or part-time)
technically knowledgeable people to change management.
For change management tasks, the staff is most effective when it:
•
Knows how to evaluate software quality assurance test results
•
Is able to negotiate with people
•
Is able to solve problems
•
Understands how changes might affect all parts of the system and operating
procedures
For configuration management tasks, the staff is most effective when it knows how to:
•
Design a fault-tolerant configuration
•
Design a configuration that balances system components so that the system performs
well
•
Use Tandem system-configuration and system-generation tools
For both the change-management and configuration-management tasks, the staff should
also have good communication, planning, and organizational skills, and should
understand the needs of application developers, operators, management, and users.