Brew City HDI

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Hi folks and thanks for your patience in waiting for these meeting notes.  I wanted to be sure that the next meeting announcement with directions was the first article on the page for a while.  This weekend, we will repost the next meeting information to the top of our site.

The Brew House for the May meeting was south campus of Northwestern Mutual.  There have been a few changes since we were here last year.  The campus has expanded the building a bit.  We got in tour of the datacenter facility and the building itself. Our topic was everything ITIL.  Specifically “Proactive Application Checkouts and Managed Deployments.”  This ended up being a good Q&A session to talk about the way ITIL looks when parts are implemented as well as getting an understanding of how the many parts work together for the good of the clients and the IT department.  More on that in a moment.

Microbrew of Chapter business

Election Results

Congrats to Phil, Eric and Tony.  They were re-elected to new terms for President,  VP Membership and VP Finance.  Cheers!

Financial report – we in great shape thanks to our sponsors and new memberships.

Membership report – We have good growth since last year and a number of new memberships.

Newsletter and Library -  Send in article ideas or articles.  We are getting our library going and we need books and other materials that you would recommend for other members.  Look for more library information soon.

Web report – Brew City HDI has a presence on FaceBook and MySpace.  This is in addition to a group on LinkedIn and pictures in Flickr.  The website itself has a new section: Happy Hour. Try the link to find “a collection of distractions to bring a smile to your face”.

Programs – here s a rundown of the next few meetings:

• June 17 @ Actuant,  Speaker: Jim Welch,  Topic: “A day in the life of a mobile worker”

• July 16 (no normal meeting)  Eric’s social night

• Aug 19 Tuesday Brewer home game  Cost: $20 includes ticket and tailgating

• Oct 21 @ Runzhimer Topic: Microsoft Presentation   [Editor’s note: bring your techs!]

• Nov 18 @ We Energies: Topic TBA

• Dec 16 @ Manpower,  End Of Year Celebration and Analyst of the Year

“Proactive Application Checkouts and Managed Deployments.”

A little background:  Northwestern Mutual has implemented or is working on 5 parts of ITIL  [resource link:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITIL]

• Incident Management (IM) – focused on getting clients back up and running as quickly as possible when things go wrong

• Problem Management (PM) – focused on finding and permanently fixing root causes to problems that arise and affect applications and infrastructure that client depend on.

• Change Management (CM) – focused on making sure changes to the applications and infrastructure that clients depend on happen with no impact on the clients

• Release Management (RM) – focused on the planning, designing, building, configuration, and test of hardware and software changes to the applications and infrastructure that the clients use and depend on.

• Configuration Management Data Base (CMDB) – This “database” or collection of storage databases holds the relationships of all the stuff IT works with.  It is used to manage the work for changes and to see what all might be or will be affected for changes, releases, incidents and problems.  [editors note: I think I may have oversimplified this, but my definition will serve the purpose for the moment.]

Let’s start with the title definition.  Application checkout refers to a “health check” of the top systems Northwestern Mutual users use on a daily bases.  This health check has the operations staff running through predefined procedures to determine if the major applications come up as expected before the time the clients expect the systems to be up an running.  Example:  if the system for billing is supposed be available by 7am, the operations staff will be going through some predefined steps to be sure the application appears to be running before the clients see it.  If there is any kind of problem, operations goes to their predefined steps to either fix the issue, or call someone in to do so.  The end result will be to minimize any impact on the clients.  Managed Deployments are just about the same thing. The focus is to make sure that changes to the software and infrastructure the clients depend on are up and running as expected after a change has been implemented.

Like all of our organizations, Northwestern Mutual has a large number of applications and infrastructure that their users care about.  Through work on Service Level Agreements with the IT department customers, 25 applications that required high availability were considered “Top Tier”.  Support for those areas build detailed test plans to let operations determine if the applications were ready for clients to use.  Changes to those applications have to be scheduled out 4 weeks in advance (8 weeks is preferred).  New potential changes to the environment have to be meshed with previously scheduled changes.  Operations is looking for test plans, back out plans, communication plans and test plans to be defined. Changes without all of these won’t happen. Once all the Change Management work is done, Operations uses the developed test plans in four windows:

1)      Morning Top Tier  (4am to 6am everyday)

2)      Weekend Maintenance (Fridays at 12am to Monday at 12am)

3)      Unplanned Maintenance and deployment  (after unplanned outages)

4)      Large project deployment weekends (after large changes)

All of these plans are dependent on the Service Level Agreements and the Operational Level Ageements (agreements between support groups).  If any service fails, an incident is created an it is checked out to determine if the extent of affect on sub-applications.

I think one of the more impressive things for the application checkouts were the number of communication channels used to convey information to clients and support teams.  Each support team has dedicated information line for thei8er clients.  Client are part of testing.  When an application go to production, info is delivered via Glossy brochures, manuals, newsletters, and emails.  Info is also provided via Sharepoint, and RSS subscriptions for reports on the system checks.  The planning calendar (Forward Schedule of Change) looks 8 weeks forward.  Plans for new releases (of changes) must have testing to insure infrastructure stability, define milestones for change, and resource lists (people and contact numbers).  All must be available 4 weeks in advance with a preference of 8 weeks.

We got a lot of information to process at this meeting.  I hope I have given you a pretty good taste of what you missed.  If anyone that was there reads this post and thinks I missed something significant, please add on with the comment section.

Till next time…

Terry Frye

VP Communications