The Hub and Spoke!

This is a checklist for an infrastructure project from the ITIL books. Identification and quantification of all the benefits to the business and its customers. The overall scope, objectives and Critical Success Factors (CSFs) of the proposed solution. The business sponsor, owner and list of stakeholders. A description of the current situation, including strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The strategic fit and details of how the preferred solution conforms to, or deviates from, existing business and technology policies, strategies and plans. The implications and impact of not proceeding with the business case. A description of the proposed new services, components or technology being considered. Constraints and dependencies. Contractual, legal and regulatory issues environmental issues. An overview of how this proposal support the key strategic objectives of: the business strategies. the technology strategy.

This report, BP GRANGEMOUTH, SCOTLAND, 29th MAY - 10th JUNE , is non-IT, but it it a great example of a incident report and a format that can readily be adopted. It also contains excellent visualizations using diagrams and pictures . This type of report should be constructed by BA for T5 . The report contains a description of the following: The three incidents that occurred at the BP Grangemouth Complex between 29th May 2000 and 10th June 2000; The immediate response of BP following the incidents (this includes the investigation carried out by the BP Task Force); The series of investigations carried out by the Competent Authority in the aftermath of the incidents; The subsequent findings of the Competent Authority investigations. The report also summarises the following: BP.s learnings from these incidents and the actions taken by BP; The key lessons for major accident hazard sites; Wider messages for industry.

The Apollo 13 team is famous for bringing back the astronauts stranded in space by solving difficult and complex problems. The teams solving the problems using the Kepner-Tregoe (KT) methodology and some pointers and resources are displayed on this blog. KT is one of the recommended ITSM/ITIL problem solving techniques. Here is a presentation about problem solving in IT which includes Kepner-Tregoe and here is a presentation to the ITSMF. Sun Global Resolution Troubleshooting (SGRT) blog is here and uses a modified Kepner-Tregoe. The Fallacy of People Problems, and How to Solve Them is an article which points out that there are a number of causes to be investigated, usually human related. The KT template is available here . This paper talks about using KT in project management. The New Rational Manager is a book published about the KT technique. Read this article of making rational decesions. Here is a summary of the rational process: Assess Situations I

Capacity management is an extremely complex discipline when it is fully implemented. Here is a suggested start to eating the elephant, which is referred to as Guerrilla Capacity Management. Crucial to the Guerrilla methodology is to create a rudimental service catalogoe and have a skeleton CMDB. The template for Guerrilla Capacity Management is available here .

Doep is the only one who reads my stuff about network best practices . Thus, here is another best practices configuration for my old mate, Doep. (Payment in Guinness !) This configuration above is to setup Outlook Web Access for Exchange to external users from the Internet. It entails using a Checkpoint Charlie configuration. A Checkpoint Charlie configuration is the use of reverse proxies in a DMZ that is accessed externally from the Internet. The external incoming connections are terminated on the reverse proxy, which then presents the web pages which have been backhauled internally from the server farm. In this case, the reverse proxy is Microsoft's ISA server 2006 . You can also read more about ISA, here . A Checkpoint Charlie configuration can be used for any type of Intranet application that is hosted on a server farm and needs to be presented to external users.

Exchange is Microsoft's messaging platform. The latest version is Exchange 2007 . This follows on from the previous checklists that was more around network troubleshooting. This is a checklist for Exchange. Jetstress testing should be performed before you install Exchange on the server. Download it here . There are some well-known risks associated with running Jetstress on a machine with Exchange installed. The first is that Jetstress could potentially delete some existing logfiles if it's configured to use the same log drives that Exchange is using. The second is that if you use a version of Jet (ESE.DLL and ESEPERF.*) different than the version installed with Exchange, the registration of the Jet database counters in the Jetstress install directory will break the database counters for Exchange after Jetstress is removed. Performance troubleshooting basics . Run the ExTrA tool. Download it here. Run the ExBPA tool. Download it here . Are your clients usi