Scenario: You are an engineer who runs a managed network on behalf of a customer. Your manager has asked you to create a change control process. Your customer and your manager will measure you only by the uptime or outages they experience, and don’t care what your process looks like. I’ve discussed why we need change control in a previous post. Knowing this, what sort of process would you create? I this post I provide a high-level template and some tips.
Network Change Nothing sparks engineering debate quite as much as ‘network change control’. It’s one of those topics we love to hate. We feel buried by useless bureaucracy. We ask, ‘Why can’t our managers just trust us, instead of weighing us down with meaningless process and red tape’? This may be a controversial perspective but I think we’ve gotten exactly what we deserve. We endure heavyweight change control procedures because when we make network changes we break stuff. We break stuff…