Section 6.5. Know Your Company s Rhythms

6.5. Know Your Company's Rhythms

Business is full of rhythms, too. If you identify the rhythms of your company's year, you can make sure your plans are in concert with those rhythms. Anything else is like trying to swim upstream. Your calendar is the long-range planning tool that lets you do this.

Every business has a light time of the year and a heavy time of the year. You can plan your system administration tasks and goals around these patterns.

I used to work at a software company that produced three software releases each year. Every 120 days, a new release would ship. The first month was mostly spent developing marketing requirements and feature lists. There were 60 days of development, two weeks of quality assurance (QA), and two weeks of manufacturing of the software and manuals. Day 120 was shipping day. Then the entire cycle began again. Because it ran like clockwork three times a year, it was a system administrator's dream.

During the first month of the cycle, most of the employees were in meetings and the network was quiet. As long as email was running, nearly any other function could be taken down for maintenance and upgrades. The "tool group" planned which OS/compiler releases would be used for the next version during the last days of the prior release cycle. The first month of the current cycle was when the system administration teams would deploy those tools. During the development stage, outages were tolerated if they were scheduled. Regular system administrator activity could happen. However, toward the end of each 120-day cycle, planned outages were banned. This was a very intense part of the cycle, when new code releases were being shipped to QA almost daily. As a result, this was the best time for system administrators to take time off. A skeleton crew was always around to deal with emergencies, but, otherwise, this is when the system administrators scheduled their vacations. Once the software "went gold" and was in manufacturing, stability was only important in the parts of the system that manufacturing relied on. Everyone else was celebrating. Then the cycle began again.

By planning the system administration work around the company's business cycle, everything went very smoothly.

Another common business cycle is the December holiday rush. For example, it is often true that retailers make half their sales during the holiday shopping season, often losing money the rest of the year. During the holiday rush, the network that supports the business must be completely stable. An hour of downtime can cost millions. Therefore, there is little IT work scheduled for that time. There is plenty of unscheduled work, mostly dealing with emergencies and tuning overloaded servers. Developers are pushed away so that they aren't tempted to make "helpful" changes when the risk would be too big. The busiest time for everyone is often a few months earlier, during the mad rush to get the new systems up and running. The lightest time is the first week of the year, when people most need time to recuperate.

Schools have an obvious cycle. There are projects related to the major milestones of the year: arrival of new students, registration, budget process, finals, graduation, summer.

Hiring has a certain periodic pattern also. For example, if you need to hire entry-level people just out of school, the hiring process often starts by advertising at colleges in February with the hopes of filling jobs with new graduates in May. Similarly, people with more experience might be older and, if they have kids, will want to move between school years, not during. Other factors may affect end-of-the-year hiring. Rarely have I been able to get hiring approval in December, sometimes because the people who approve such things are on vacation, but often because no new hires are permitted so as to keep the end-of-year numbers looking good. Schedule your hiring around these cycles.

I love working in cyclic industries. It makes planning things a lot easier. In fact, when I'm not in a cyclic industry, I try to find the unofficial cycle, or, when possible, move the company into a cycle. One software company I worked at had no consistency in their software releases, and I became the advocate for an n-month cycle until one was adopted. The benefits are company-wide: marketing, operations, and budgeting can plan around the cycle, and it nearly eliminates the problem of developers scheduling vacations at inopportune times.

Your company has a similar business cycle. It might be as fast as once a month or as long as a year. If you work at NASA, it might be as long as a multiyear space mission. If you work in politics, it might be as regular as the legislative cycle or the campaign cycle.

Take some time to figure out your company's cycle. You might want to ask your boss what he thinks the business cycle is. Once that is done, consider the following questions:

• What is the business cycle for this company?

• How can I better schedule my projects?

• When is the optimal time to schedule my time off?

• Can the system administration group better schedule its projects?

• Can we turn the system administration processes into cycles that are linked to the light and busy parts of the business cycle?

• If the business pattern is random, can we influence the business to make it more regular? Or can we simply establish a periodic IT schedule and see whether others plan around it?