Introduction to NonStop Operations Management

Application Management
Introduction to NonStop Operations Management–125507
11-6
Establishing a Production-Assurance Control Group
•
Is the interface to application security easy to use?
•
What are the hardware requirements?
•
What are the disk space requirements and are they reasonable?
•
Has your organization’s capacity-planning and application-sizing staff analyzed
the application for future hardware requirements? Should a Tandem analyst be
contacted for help with sizing and reviewing the application?
•
Have arrangements been made to acquire additional hardware, if necessary?
•
What is the implementation strategy for the application?
•
Will the application be implemented in a phased manner? Are there backout
options?
•
How will the application be tested before it is placed into production and after it
is placed into production?
•
How often will software changes occur?
Establishing a Production-Assurance Control Group
When an application requires input data, users, rather than operators, should be
responsible for entering the data. Many operations organizations have a production-
assurance control group to act as a liaison between the operations staff and the users. A
production-assurance control group is responsible for:
•
Setting up jobs that require parameters such as dates and options.
•
Scheduling jobs to run at the appropriate times.
•
Conveying any special instructions to the operators regarding the runs.
•
Checking the outputs and distributing them when jobs are completed. If there are
any discrepancies, they correct the problem and rerun the jobs without involving the
users.
•
Tracking down reports and reprinting them, if necessary.
•
Working with the change control group to ensure that new versions of the
application programs, libraries, and obey files are properly installed.
Production-assurance personnel are usually senior operators or librarians from the
applications area. They generally possess good communications skills because they need
to translate a user’s request into the job in a way that will get it done. They are generally
assigned to one or more user departments so that they become very familiar with their
assigned group’s requirements and problems, providing high service levels to the users.
Production-assurance control groups are common in batch environments.