My apologies to George Strait, but the call me the fireman. Why? I and my team spend the days of our lives fixing crisis. We're good at it...too good. People have come to expect that we will respond to any crisis with passion, commitment, speed, and caring. While its great we can do this, it is truly a bad thing.
We had one of the worst events that you can have in a hospital last week, a small 2 second blip in power. Short enough to just be noticed, not long enough for generators to kick in. Because we have an aging facility and lots of construction going on, we have become somewhat accustom to power issues, not to mention the squirrels that have sacrificed themselves on a transformer. We have developed a rapid response plan to deal with theses blips.
Last week, the team executed the plan almost flawlessly. The only problem they had was me getting in the way of the process (sorry guys!). The team quickly and efficiently went through the floors, verified operations, and rapidly started repairs/hot swaps on anything that did not recover. We found we had some training opportunities and needed to tweak our process just a tad.
What is bad about about this? We do it so well that staff want it to be the "standard". The problem: We can do that, but what/how does it help the IT team be more productive in the future? How much do we increase cost with this model? How can we provide the same perception of service in our "normal" operations?
Not always easy questions to answer, and in some cases, not easy changes to make. But when is change ever easy?
I don't like being known as the fireman. You only call a fireman when you think something is terribly wrong. I would rather be know as Smokey the Bear (...only you can prevent...). We need to fix our processes so that we watchfully tend our fires or, better yet, we don't have them at all. Sure, fixing our processes to prevent fires will be just as tough, but isn't that better than (my apologies to the Talking Heads) burnin' down the house?
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