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.