By Mary Anne Hopper, Senior Consultant
As you can imagine, I travel quite a bit as a consultant for Baseline. Over my tenure, I have developed a standard routine for getting through the airport. More often than not, things have gone pretty smoothly for me. Until this week – my bag was pushed into the extra screening area where it turned out there was an over-sized tube of toothpaste that had to be thrown away. How did this happen when week in and week out, I use the same bag for my stuff and always get through without a hitch? Well, I deviated from my process.
You see, the prior week I actually checked a bag and was able to throw a full tube of toothpaste in the ditty bag and I never checked when I was packing for this week’s trip. I deviated from my standard process. If you’ve ever implemented a “small” or “low impact” change that has blown up an ETL job, changed the meaning of a field, or caused a report to return improper results, you know where I’m going with this.
Process is important. Discipline in implementing to that process is even more important. Am I proposing that every small change go through an entire full-blown project lifecycle? Absolutely not. But, there should be a reasonable life cycle for everything that goes into a production quality environment. Taking consistent steps in delivery helps to ensure that even the smallest of changes do not result in high impact outages. This can be achieved by taking the time to analyze, develop, and then test changes prior to implementation. What that right level of rigor is depends on the impact of the environment being unavailable or incorrect.
So, what did I learn from my experience with the tooth paste? My deviation only cost me about $3.50, some embarrassment in the TSA line, and an unplanned trip to CVS. I learned I will no longer change my travel packing plans (whether or not I check luggage). What can you learn? There is a cost in time and/or dollars if you don’t follow a set process. The best starting place is to work with your business and/or IT partners to reach consensus on that right level of rigor – and stick with it.
Photo provided by CogDogBlog via Flickr (Creative Commons License).
Mary Anne has 15 years of experience as a data management professional in all aspects of successful delivery of data solutions to support business needs. She has worked in the capacity of both project manager and business analyst to lead business and technical project teams through data warehouse/data mart implementation, data integration, tool selection and implementation, and process automation projects.
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