Top Ten Best Operational Practices

The second day of the conference Shaun Whalon from Intec gave the guidelines to the Top Ten Operational Best Practices.

In this post I show you the notes I have taken, completed with some comments and opinion.

1. To have an operations plan

The plan must include a schedule with all the operational tasks in the system.
For each task the plan must include the following information:

* Name of the task

* Start date
* Duration (estimated)
* Resources (estimation of the resources that can be consumed during the execution).
* Precedence

To programme the tasks It must be take into account the precedence between the tasks, the incompatibilities and the resources consumed by the tasks.

2. Housekeeping

Run periodically housekeeping tools and have our system “clean”
For example:

- Purge Old Data
- Keep directories clean
- Analyze the database

3. Manage performance

- Separate residential and corporate customers in different bill cycles.
- Take the unbilled customers into account
- Remove “dormant” customers from active bill cycles
- Monitor growth
- Study and learn about the performance in the system

4. Change management

- Establish a policy about change management, for example, to change the tariffs.

I think that this point (the change management in Singl.eView) it could be an interesting point to open a discussion forum. Specially talking about how to transfer configuration from one evironment to another or how to manage the versions or changes in the configuration. What do you think about the Archive tool? Are you using any system of Concurrent Versions to control the code of your functions (cvs,vss)? How do you manage the Id´s of the entities between the development environment (and other dev environments), the preproduction environment and the production environment?

5. Minimize Delays

Usually the systems are down more time that they must be down.

- Monitor Log Files

- Learn how and when the system must be bounce.

- Bounce only the some servers if it´s possible

- After each update of the configuration study if a bounce is needed or not

6. Partition Manteinance

Perform regularly the tasks related with the partitions

- Rotate partitions

- Verify and close partitions

- Sort partitions

7. Checklists

Create checklists in a way to document or to procedure common tasks, for example, from the way to find an error to the way to update the configuration, etc, etc.

8. Manage DVP errors

Prevention it´s better than cure.

9. Audit the database

Audit in the database the update of de data, what user and when made changes in the data.

10. Keep current

Like other software vendors Intec only gives support to the recent versions, and the patches and bugs are fixed over the latest versions.

If you has a Support Manteinace contract with Intec, you must review this point to avoid become your system unsupported.

User Group Conference

This week I attended at The Intec User Group Conference (EMEA) at Barcelona. This conference took place at the fantastic Grand Marina Hotel. Near the Mediterranean sea and with a marvellous weather, the sun, the organization and the Intec people offered to the users two fantastic days to talk, to ask and to know more about Singl.eView and other products offered by Intec. And to relax a little, why not?

The conference started with a panel of high level discussions about the Strategic Developments in European Telco’s. In this Ben Bannister remember to all the attendants the necessity to be in compliance with the laws related to data retention and also to report following the IFRS (International Financial Reporting Specification) and take in account that, depending on the specific country rules, our company can be affected for the legislation. In fact, during the product roadmap and the presentation of the new capabilities of Singl.eView CB v6.01 they have shown that they had taken this is mind.

The first evening the conference was split in three streams
- Wholesale & Settlements (Intec Interconnect)
- Charging and Billing (Intec Convergent Billing)
- Network (Intec Mediation and Intec Activation)


In the billing stream it can be remarked the conferences about the new capabilities of the Singl.eView version 6.01 and 7.00, the session about the top ten best operational practices, the session about Performance (with Gerry Carty one the Singl.eView genius) and a surprising lesson about the Collaborative Test Model. I will try to summarize some of this sessions in the next posts.

The coffee breaks and the launch were great opportunities to meet users of Singl.eView from different countries, to ask directly to the experts and to attend to the solutions showcase (in which you can see live demonstrations of some products).

The Intec Users Group (an association of users) had one of their representatives at the conference. This confirmed to us that there isn’t representation at this group of Singl.eView product. I personally think that it could be very interesting to have direct representation at this community. This group performs twice a year two meetings with the managers of Intec to talk about the problems, necessities and to help to establish the guidelines or the road map in most of Intec Products (except Singl.eView). I would to know your opinions about this and I encourage to you to post something.

In summary were two nice days, although perhaps there was some lack of technical sessions. Perhaps Intec will think in this for next sessions.

Intec User Group Conference

The next edition of the User Group Conference will be in Barcelona from 21 to 23 November 2006.

You can find a brief information of the event at this site .