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

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

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.

Starting a New Project

I'm about to start a new project.

To provide some background, I am in IT Service Management (manager of computer services stuff), I write procedures and flow charts on how to best do a job that will produce an outcome that the business would be interested in knowing.

The project I am about to start brings together as many procedures and functions via their exsisting databases into a single database, for easy access and consolidated reporting... bored already?

If you are still reading then you might know of what I am talking about.
I am implementing a CMS (Configuration Management System) made up of at least 3 databases (CMDBs - Configuration Management Databases).

I am going to use a central Service Management tool that currently handles the Incident Management, Problem Management and Known Errors Database procedures, to act as the CMS interface of the multiple CMDBs, this will of course allow my Service Desk to easily link Incidents to CIs and Known Errors in the CMDB.

Once the CMS has been implemented I will then implement Change Management and Request Fulfilment Management into the same Service Management tool.

However this is looking like a very large elephant to me, does anyone have any suggestions, templates or checklists to getting started on this momentous task?

- If you are interested in this type of subject I will post regular updates on my progress.