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CMS Project Planning

As a good Prince2 Practitioner should I have written a Project Plan for my CMS (CMDB) project (project geek).

Covering off the Project Owner, Stakeholders and resources involved.
As well as the Description, Prerequisites and External Dependencies I also included 'Lessons Incorporated'!

Lets face it, there are more failed CMDBs then there are successful CMDBs, they fail for many reasons.
* lack of senior management buy-in
* lack of clear ownership and responsibility
* Forcing analysts to use a centralised database with no buy-in
* High Administration resource
* Low Budget
* Garbage in Garbage out
* and there are more...

So a successful plan would aim to address all these failures, with one exception the Budget, money is tight and always will be.

To update on the information that will be collected from an Infrastructure CMDB, whats been included are:
* Host Name
* Environment - Prod, Standby Prod, Test, Dev...
* Manufacturer and Model
* Asset ID
* Serial Number
* IP Address / Subnet / Default Gateway
* Location
* OS and OS Version
* Local Disk and Partitions'
* Memory Size
* CPU - manufactures model
* Installation Date
* Last Change Date

Provide live information of the status of the Configuration Item, such as OK, Warning and Down.

Clearly this data is limited to an IT Server Configuration Item, however it is a good place to start.

I have given a 1 month schedule to provide a Draft version ready for UAT testing, plus a further 2 weeks til Final Quality Check is completed.

Watch This Space.

- Eric

A brief what is and isn't KCS

Following last weeks KCS course, I thought I would share what it is and what it isn't.
Honestly before anything has even started with implementing KCS there is a resistance movement brewing.

Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS) is a methodology and a set of practices and processes that focuses on knowledge as a key asset of the customer/technical support organisation. KCS seeks to:

* Create content as a by-product of solving problems, which is better known as Incident Management within the ITIL incident management process, as well as the problem management process. As people capture information related to an incident, they create knowledge that can be reused within the support process by others as well as customers with access to a self-service knowledge base.

* Evolve content based on demand and usage. As people interact with the knowledge based within the incident management process, they must review it before delivering the knowledge to a customer. If they discover the need to correct or enhance the knowledge, they will fix it at that time or flag it for another person to fix if they do not have the access authority to the knowledge. Under this model, knowledge is evolved just-in-time based on demand instead of just-in-case. This lowers the cost of knowledge management.

* Develop a knowledge base of an organisation's collective experience to-date. New knowledge capture within the incident management process is an experience resulting from one interaction. The knowledge has not been validated or verified beyond the initial incident. Thus the initial knowledge is not as trusted in this state, which is referred to as Draft knowledge. It is not until reuse occurs that trust is improved. At some point the knowledge will be marked as trusted and either Approved for internal use or Published for self-service.
The knowledge base under the KCS methodology includes knowledge that is at different states of trust and visibility. The collective experiences to date challenges the traditional thinking that all knowledge in a knowledge base must perfect, validated, and highly trusted.

* Reward learning, collaboration, sharing and improving. The culture of the organization must change to recognize the value of an individual based on the knowledge they share that enables the organization to be more effective and efficient.


KCS is not
* Another tool or piece of software.
* A set of directories or documents, or an information storage system.
* A replacement for a Wiki or Intranet, and it won’t duplicate what is already in these systems.

Having resistance to change is to be expected and should be treated as a positive opportunity to demonstrait improvements, because these people really want the best for their organisation, however also want to see you personally fail.

Be strong and fight the good fight.

- Eric

Data to be collected to feed the CMS

After some reading of manuals and online forums, I have come up with a simple list of things I want the CMS to gather from an Infrastructure CMDB. (Servers, Routers, Firewalls...).

* Name
* Model
* Serial Number
* IP Address / Subnet / Gateway
* Location
* OS
* OS Version
* Firmware
* Firmware Version
* Disk and Disk Space
* Partitions
* Backup information (partitions)
* Memory
* CPU
* Monitoring
* Installation Date
* Last Change

Would also like to be able to display live information for Cofiguration Item states, such as Up (working ok), Warning (reaching thresholds), Down (not good).

Now it is time to meet with the Infrastructure team to see if all of this (or any of this) is possible.

- Eric

New baby girl

I am once again the proud father of a new baby girl.

Emerson Riley, she was born on Sunday the 24th at a respectful time of the morning at 9:21am after a 2 hour labour. We were all home for lunch that same day.

Mum, Baby and the family are all well.

KCS - I'm in a course today

Just in case anyone (all 2 of your were wondering) I'm on a course today and tomorrow.

The course I am doing is call Knowledge Centered Support (KCS)
Here is the Wikipedia blurb about KCS

Following this course I'll continue my analysis of the Service Management tool I will be using for CMS, then gather feedback from stakeholders of the information they would like to see from the CMS reports.

As for KCS that is another project I have been charged with, if you have ever been interested in implementing a dynamic knowledgebase then watch this space.

CMS - Where to start?

Where to start?

A simple but effective business plan would be to follow 3 simple steps
1. Ask what your customers/users want
2. Build it
3. Give it to them
So I will keep it very simple and just start with Step 1:
“Ask the benefactors of the CMS database what is it that they want to see from it?”

Who are the benefactors?
• Change and Release Management
• Configuration Management
• Incident and Problem Management
• Capacity Management
• Availability Management
• Event Management
• Knowledge Management
• Project Management
• Technical Support Teams
• Development Teams
• Financial Management
• Business stakeholders for reports generated from the CMS
• And several more…

What should I ask?
• What do you have now that is important to your function?
• What would you like to see that could improve what you have now?

First I better work out what the CMDB tool that I will be using can actually produce, rather not get into a scenario of over promising and under delivering. Even if what the CMS has to offer is far better than the current state.