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Why I am learning to program (again)

BoobBoo / January 10, 2012 / No comments

Well it is the 2nd week in January and for some people the New Years resolutions are slipping, but for many of us there is 1 resolution I hope is not slipping and that is the massive challenge set by many organisations like CodeAcademy to learn a new computer language this year.

I made the decision upon my return from TechEd in November to learn 2 new languages - Ruby and C#. The turning point for me was I suppose threefold

1. I wanted greater flexibility in managing my Cloud environments – I knew VBScript and could use that, but I fancied a little bit more of a challenge. Ruby is a flexible, powerful and concise scripted language, it is also cross platform which helps!

2. I had an idea for a Kinect application for Solution Manager, the SDK for the Kinect uses either C++ or C# so I needed to use one of them

3. Being able to interact with the vast world of web services and APIs to do things in a more structured and less manual way

I would put Owen Pettiford great blog on why “Developers are the new king makers” – a great blog with a powerful message.

I picked 2 languages, Ruby and C# because they are both important in the wider world and because they are fundamentally different.

Ruby is a Scripting language, which means it is compiled at runtime, meaning that changes can be performed between executions without needing to be recompiled. It is a very lightweight and scalable language, which when used as Ruby on Rails is the basis of many web applications. So through knowing Ruby and some Rails, I would be able to interact programmatically with many web sites, web services and APIs. Importantly, Ruby is considered an Edge component of SAP PaaS platforms, so knowing Ruby would help me to take advantage of PaaS services.

C# is a compiled language, which means that it is compiled at design time and often runs faster as the compilation overhead is removed. C# is a Microsoft language which forms a key part of the .Net framework, as Microsoft is a major SAP partner and many external interfaces and user interactions are through Microsoft – eg Duet Enterprise, Sharepoint, BizTalk. Knowing C# would help me to adapt and understand many of the new technologies coming from SAP and Microsoft – like the Kinect. C# is also not that far removed from Java, so any delta training required should be a little easier.

I know I would struggle to learn two languages at the same time and do my day job, so I have concentrated on Ruby as it appears to have a faster pay off to effort ratio – which will keep me interested and also provide me with value which I can put back into my day job. It will also get me back into OO programming, something I have not looked at since my Computer Graphics days in University.

Hopefully many of you are also taking on the CodeAcademy challenge to get t grips with programming, and I hope you succeed at it because there is a world of data out there. Human beings are producing more data in 1 year than previously existed in all the combined previous years. So being able to work with it, manipulate it and use it to do amazing things is paramount to not being held hostage by others who can do it.

Category: Capgemini, Cloud, Lifestream, Project Stuff /

SAP in IaaS Cloud environments – why are they so difficult to manage

BoobBoo / October 30, 2011 / No comments

Having worked with SAP landscapes in various IaaS platforms, I have come to a disturbing conclusion – they are damn hard to keep control of and manage on a medium to long term basis. This has become something of an elephant in the room for many of us Cloud evangelists, but I feel that it is something that must be addressed in order to allow Cloud environments to progress from great finite lifespan systems to systems that are fully integrated into normal landscapes. discussed below are some of the major challenges that can effect Cloud projects/implementations.

Flexibility

It is one of the biggest selling points of IaaS environments is the level of flexibility that they provide. Through this flexibility, we have the ability to do things like

Cloning systems – creating clones of systems is as easy as a few mouse clicks, similarly creating instances from these clones is just as easy. This is a double edged sword as creating snapshots of instances requires additional storage, which needs monitored, managed and paid for. By creating a clone, we have doubled the amount of resources being used, if we then create an instance from that clone, we have now tripled the amount of resources being used. As you can see it is very easy to increase the amount of resources being charged for by the IaaS provider.

Allocate new infrastructure – creating/allocating new infrastructure is deceptively easy, this is because although it is easy to create an additional 100Gb volume – it requires discipline/processes to make sure it is labelled and catalogued properly to ease administration. The diagram below shows the nightmare that can be unleashed through a lack of discipline.

The graphs below show the growth month by month of the number of volumes against the number of servers of an implementation I managed recently. In July and August, the system was implemented and stable, in Sept it underwent some DR testing which increased the number of servers and the number of volumes. Despite this testing being complete in October, the number of volumes has not returned to the baseline, in fact it is not even close – even though the number of servers has dropped to baseline.

The graph below shows in more detail the spread between those volumes which are Available and those In-Use, this confirms that in October the number of volumes which were not attached to servers increased. This indicates that although the servers were terminated, people are not deleting the associated storage – because “you never know if you’ll reuse it”.

Create new snapshots – snapshots are the “get out of jail free” card of data backups, most IaaS platforms have native snapshot capability which can be used as a replacement for normal backup applications. Although these like backup media need to managed and aged properly to make sure that backup snapshots do not become en exponential mess. Like the diagram above, this ease of creation means that people performing any changes will snapshot a volume ‘just in case’ something goes wrong.

Security

Security has been and continues to be a worry for some on IaaS platforms, and in my opinion a little unfairly. Many service providers provide deep and granular controls of their services, for example Amazon has the IAM, which provides granular security. Within the AWS platform, each user gets a log on for the AWS console as well as an X509 certificate for signing web service calls. This X509 certificate can be used by any 3rd party application or service and maintains the permissions defined by the IAM. Often people focus on the platform security issues without talking about the security of the OS and application layers, it is easy to hypothesize why this might be the case and many articles have been written to compare IaaS security with on-premise security. Due to the self-service nature of IaaS providers, their desire to make security as easy as possible and the “Jack of all trades – Master of none” approach taken by many IaaS practitioners, it is understandable why companies and people are wary of it. In order to provide good assurances, IaaS platform security must provide auditing and inspection of configuration using existing deployed toolsets, otherwise the security which is not transparent will never be fully trusted.

Operations

In order to move IaaS landscapes from temporary/finite systems to systems that are properly integrated into landscapes, they need to be able to be managed in the same way. This includes tasks like –

Backups – although it is possible to use the native snapshot ability on data volumes, this is not a great solution. This is because ageing the snapshots is difficult but not impossible, take a look at a service called Skeddly.com, this allows you to age and delete snapshots on a scheduled basis. For many operations people, using a proper managed and integrated backup product is still the right way to go.

Startup/Shutdown – in order to achieve the savings quoted by many people, systems should be run only for the periods for which they are required. This means that instances need to be started and stopped according to a defined schedule, for example my own template systems run between 6am and 10pm. In order to achieve this something needs to run the start and stop scripts, two options exist

Run a single instance 24*7 to run command line tools to start and stop the other instances – this goes against the principle of what we want to achieve but it can be used for other purposes as well.

Use a web based service to start and stop the instances remotely, for me this is an attractive option and I have used a service called Skeddly.com to perform scheduled actions on my AWS EC2 landscape.

Management tools

The biggest bug bear I and anyone I have spoken to has, is the lack of a toolset which captures and enables system owners and maintainers to quickly and easily find out how every resource is connected and utilised. All the information is present in every management interface provided, but in every one of them I have used, all the infrastructure components are on different pages – see the diagram below.

As you can see from above, I can see the status of all my instances, but if I want to see all the volumes attached I need to go to a different page. This assumes that I have correctly populated the Meta-Data tags from the instances page so I can determine what each volume is attached to (see volume storage nightmare picture above)

Several people have suggested a number of applications like Chef or Puppet, which I have not had a chance to deploy as they are quite outside my core area of expertise – but I do know that Rightscale uses Chef to manage customers’ infrastructures.

Ultimately, Cloud environments will always walk the fine line between flexibility and uncontrollability. This is simply because if it was easy to provide a simple, flexible and controllable service all host providers and data centres would have them. In order to maximise the benefits of IaaS, there needs to be a clear consensus between the business and IT to define what they want from each system. This will enable IT to create a flexible wrapper round these systems to provide solid management without too much overhead. The really good IT departments will drive this work themselves and automate as much as possible so they can drive their own efficiencies whilst still serving the business. The explosion of IaaS services is partly because businesses got tired of IT departments telling them ‘No’ or it’ll take 4 weeks to create that 10Gb volume.

Category: Capgemini, Cloud, Lifestream /

Landscape and Virtualisation Manager concerns

BoobBoo / October 26, 2011 / No comments

Last week I received some disturbing news about the license model of the new Landscape and Virtualisation Manager (LVM) which is entering Ramp-Up in November, before I get to the news I received lets look at what the LVM is.

The LVM is a new product from SAP which is the replacement for the Adaptive Computing Controller (ACC), the new LVM has increased capabilities over and above the ACC – for example the LVM has the ability to script and execute system copies automatically, it has dashboards and lots of management capability of physical, virtual and (hopefully soon) Cloud environments.

The LVM is, for me, one of the most exciting SAP products coming out in the next year, it effectively ‘closes the circle’ of the SAP technical administration tools – Landscape Management Database, SMSY (System Landscape) and System Landscape Directory.

By ‘closing the circle’ in terms of Technical administration I mean, the ability to have multiple sources of information cross-feeding each other efficiently providing a single version of the truth for each of the administration applications

LMDB – Analogous to the SLD, it provides many of the same functions and synchronises directly with SMSY

SLD – Provides information on each registered system, providing software component and patch levels.

SMSY – This is the central hub of all information in Solution Manager, everything that is associated with a system gets it’s information from here

LVM – Provides dashboards, control capabilities for instances like start/stop or relocate

During Teched Bangalore, a colleague of mine was attending a Virtualisation session, during this session it was mentioned that the LVM will be a licensed product and will not be provided as part of the SAP license like Solution Manager. This to me was a vey strange statement as it was always my understanding that the LVM, like the ACC would be provided as part of the SAP License and would be available to all for download. For me, not providing it in this fashion would be a bad idea for the following reasons

1. No-one will use it.

The ACC has taken many years to get to where it is today, and it is a far more useable product in the last 2 versions that it ever was before. Still there has not been great uptake for it with customers, again for a number of reasons (integration with SolMan being one of them), but at least the ACC was free, this encouraged people to use it, even if was a skunk works project by the Basis team after seeing it demonstrated. If you make people pay for it, and get the price wrong then you alienate your market. Also how do you really quantify the ROI in saving the Basis team nearly an hour when doing a kernel upgrade across 15 servers. SAP have been promising for years to make administration easier to reduce TCO etc…, now that they have delivered tools like Solution Manager 7.1, the LMDB and the LVM, those statements have never looked so attractive or achievable.

2. It will not function within the partner ecosystem

One of the key selling points for LVM is both the extensibility of the product to link up with different infrastructures (see top diagram), it will not replace your Tivoli or HP equivalent, but work with them in a push/pull fashion. Partners will provide good resources if there is a demand from customers, they will just provide plain resources if it’s contractual. If no-one uses the product, then SAP can expect to see poor partner development of add-ons for the product which would make it a killer application.

3. Value proposition disappears

One of the many things that SAP have touted within the LVM is the ability to run system copies and refreshes, for this capability there was an expectation of paying for a license – which was reasonable. The main value proposition is that by using LVM, and with it’s tight integration into all the landscape management components mentioned above, the whole management of the pre, during and post tasks was infinitely simpler. If the whole LVM incurs a license fee, and the partner ecosystem falters, then the 3rd party tools, which handle more than just SAP start to look attractive again and SAP will have developed a smart application which no-one uses.

Today I have a call with SAP to get to the bottom of this and hopefully I will be happy, although probably under NDA so will not be able to write about it until ramp up. Regardless of what SAP are going to do with the product, I would strongly urge you to look at the product – it is a great piece of technology and does ‘close the circle’ on technical administration. If SAP treat it right and nurture both it’s partners and the ecosystem, then LVM can grow into a cornerstone product for SAP applications, if SAP treats it’s customers as a way to make a fast buck out of licenses then SAP will have wasted both money and brownie points with the #sapadmin community. SAP will have pods for the LVM at Madrid and also check out session TEC120 for more information.

Category: Capgemini, Cloud, Lifestream, SAP /

Architecting an SAP Upgrade and Unicode conversion

BoobBoo / June 21, 2011 / No comments

I blogged last year about a programme of work to run several upgrades and Unicode conversions on multi-terabyte SAP Systems for a client. Finally I have been able to pull together a series of posts which will detail the work, the challenges and the solutions we implemented during the programme. The upgrade programme lasted for 10 months and covered a number of projects,

The upgrade projects (Listed below)
A Data Centre migration and support migration to an outsourcing supplier (Run by the client and the outsourcing supplier)
Hardware migration (As part of the DC move)

These blogs will focus on the upgrade of the ECC system, for the simple reason that it was the one I was closest to, although I will talk about the other upgrades and the challenges they posed. At the start of these projects it is important to have strong idea on how to execute the upgrade and Unicode process, I use the word idea because at this point it is an idea; it has not been validated by anything other than experience from other projects. I looked at the overall programme of work being executed at the client and the client’s roadmap for the future and developed an end-point of where the systems should end up at the end of the project – this is detailed in the table below

Once I had decided on the versions of the O/S, the database and the SPS levels of the applications, the main consideration is how do you get to those versions. The SPS levels are quite easy as they can be integrated into the upgrades and handled during the upgrade runtime. The O/S and DB versions changes are usually handled outside the upgrade process, but they can be interwoven with Unicode conversions depending on the scenario and so it is important to look at what else is going on within the landscape to see what options are available to you to achieve your aims – for me my saving grace was to be the data centre migration.

The diagrams below show two options available to achieve the O/S and DB versions, using the Unicode conversion and another doing it seperately.

(Notes: The colour of the servers is important as it reflects a change of hardware
IA64 – Itanium Processor architecture
X64 – X86 64Bit Processor architecture
NUC – NonUnicode
UC – Unicode)

Below is a table which details the agruements for and against each approach and you can quite clearly see a winner

There is one factor in all the of the discussions about options above that I have not dealt with, and that is the database size. Database size is a major driver as to which method of conversion you undertake, the larger the database and the longer it takes to convert – that is a fact. Not all databases are created equal, different vendors, different versions, different levels of administration all play their part in the Export/Import timings, but still data volume is the kicker – in this project a 4TB database had already defined the process as parallel as there was not a big enough window to perform the Unicode conversion as a serial task, the question now was just how much parallelisation did I need to use.

The next post will deal with the actual PoC process and what we found out running it.

Category: Capgemini, Project Stuff, Upgrades and Unicode conversion /

Simple monitoring systems

BoobBoo / April 25, 2011 / No comments

Over the last ten years I have interviewed many people, I like to ask questions which deal with interestng real-world problems. Recently I have begun asking about simple monitoring systems, specialising in projects I often have requirements for quick, flexible point solutions, monitoring these project landscapes is important, so I like to find out how others would try to accomplish this goal. I find the answers interesting for two reasons, it often shows how involved people really were on their projects and also how much value they place on adminstration and monitoring.

Answers I have received ranged from

A. Solution Manager
B. Wiley interoscope
C. CCMS
D. Other commodity systems

Which are all valid answers, but they are missing the point of what I was looking for, even with prompting, people found it very difficult to understand how you could produce a quick, simple monitoring solution which would provide simple metrics which would allow effective monitoring of a project system.

Six years ago I built a very simple and effective monitoring based on a SQL Server 2005 RDBMS, this was criticial because it has the scheduler built into the Data Transformation Service (DTS) which allows scheduled command script execution and import into the database. The basis for the system was an application called GFI Languard. I used the product to discover my server landscape, then extended the database schema with my own tables to receive the data I was sending to it via the DTS scripts.

For example I extracted log files for backups, imported them into temporary tables and then extracted the return codes for reporting. Windows event logs were dumped into tables and specific return codes were filtered out to leave an exception based reporting list. An RFC command line job checked if the system was up or down every 20mins and recorded the outcome in the database.
Within SAP, I experimented and had an ABAPer friend write a program to output the critical information from my daily check routines eg, 24hrs of SM21, summary text of last CheckDB job.

Both of these systems were simple and highly extensible, they were implemented quickly and delivered to me by the most expedient means available, usually e-mail. This meant that I could come into the office in the morning and recieve an e-mail with the customer’s daily report. It was the same format, which could be compared against the previous days, if I felt there was an underlying pattern to something I could do direct queries against the database to tease that out.

It taught me about monitoring, what is really important and what is garnish, it introduced me into the world of SLAs and ensuring that this mashup of tools would keep me within my company’s SLA but still freeing me up to do more interesting work.

Of course we now have tools like Solution Manager, and Tivoli which are great at monitoring and reporting – but they are a devil to set up. There do not seem to be many quick deployment frameworks to satisfy a project requirement of a machine that will exist for a few months. If there are, please do let me know – except for the new version of Landscape Manager and Solution Manager. Perhaps we need a default set of metrics which can be replicated with better thresholds than those set in CCMS by default?

Category: Interesting, Lifestream, Project Stuff /

Learnings from my travels

BoobBoo / April 5, 2011 / One comment

For the last 4 years I have traveled to various places with my work as an IT consultant, some places have been more interesting than others – but all have been an adventure :-)

This brief piece is to show the strategies l have found to be very useful when traveling.

1. Booking your travel and accommodation

Companies quite often use Travel agencies to book travel for their employees, this is both a blessing and a curse.

A blessing because it takes frees you up to get on with doing more exciting things, a curse because quite often the agency lacks the bigger picture of what you want.

I once was booked to travel to a client’s site using the travel agency, they managed to book me into a horrendous hotel that was rated one of the worst hotels by Tripadvisor users – simply because it was on their list of hotels in budget for that city.

When the client informed me of the horrendousness of the hotel, I jumped on to Laterooms.com and found a much nicer hotel, highly rated on Tripadvisor, in budget and also on the company list of hotels – my question to the agency was why was I not put there in the first place?

Simple – the people booking on my behalf did not have to live with the choices they made on my behalf, they just checked me off their to-do list.

2. Knowing your destination

Before travelling anywhere I am not familiar with, I check 3 things

a. Tripadvisor - anyone who doesn’t know of this site should get themselves on it immediately and see the wealth of information on places – iPhone users must have the app

b. Local city guides -for information on getting around, because taxi’s are not always the best way to get around of see the city

c. Google Maps - useful to get your bearings, also Streetview is exceptionally useful for picking out landmarks along your route – that way you do not need to look like a tourist all the time.

3. What to pack

For me, I usually travel to a single location within a geography so packing for me is reasonably easy – although some people I know travel through several climatic zones, so packing for them is quite difficult.

The basis of packing for travelling is the always the essentials – toileteries and underwear, no matter where you are going you always need these.

As I usually do not check my bags on the plane , so as you can see from the picture I pack fairly light on toileteries – simply because the hotels I stay at supply shower gel so I just use theirs.

Packing your case is an art in itself, the enemy of packing is little gaps and the goal is to keep the level of your clothes even. I prefer the rolling method of packing (shown here)

I am not quite as good as the picture above, but I do alright

Electronics is an essential in my job as an IT consultant, given the chance I would have every lead and power supply I own in my case – but I do not have the room.

Moving from one place to the next is also a recipe for losing things if you do not have a good system.

Since some idiot decided to try and blow up a plane, people have had to use clear ziplock bags for their toiletries, I now have two very nice washbags which are useless to me as washbags.

Consequently I use them as holders for my leads, memory sticks and mouse, I have a single place for all my leads which is beside my laptop all the time – so when I am finished with something I just throw it back in.

Also because everything has a place, the bag, I have stopped losing things.

4. Surviving the airport

This is heavily dependant on how long you have to stay in the airport, for example the survival strategy for a 1 hour stay in the airport is much different to one that will see you through a 9 hour stay.

One thing remains constant for me is the need for a good airport lounge, even for 20 mins, it can be a haven from the madness of the main terminal.

If you have to stay in the airport for more than about an hour it is usually worth the money, if you have to pay, simply in the ability to have free tea and coffee or alcohol and a comfy seat.

Sites like Priority Pass or Executive Lounges can get you access for a fee, a Google of the airport might even yield a direct link to pay for the lounge.

As your time increases, so does the requirement for more facilities for example showers and/or a changing area are important for lay overs on travel that carries you overnight.

One thing I find exceptionally important is, do not rush especially in unfamiliar surroundings – rushing leads to impatience, mistakes and a general lack of politeness that can stop people helping you.

I get to the airport at least 1 hour before take off for domestic flights, and 2.5 hours for international, this means I am not rushing around, can deal with any hold ups and when I get air-side I can enjoy a leisurely drink of something.

5. Onward travel

I do my homework to see what the best method of onward travel is, after all I refuse to take the mickey with my expenses – if I would not spend my own money on it, why should I spend the company’s/client’s.

So for me, public transport, taxi’s or hire vehicles are valid forms of onward travel and each destination is different, I ask my colleagues who might have been there first what they did.

I ask the client what their recommendation would be, and I check out websites for the area I will be in for more information.

For example – Tripadvisor has a section on transportation for each city

London Public Transport, the most comprehensive site for getting around

Lonely Planet Guide to New York transport, useful advice and some good links

6. Having fun on ‘company time’

I am not all that rock and roll, my de-stressing is not like a war movie – I know people much worse than I am. That said I have had occasions where my judgement was definitely faulty and I got away with things by being lucky.

Companies, mostly, provide their employees with travel insurance and have a duty of care to their staff – this is a double edged sword though, remember you are travelling at their expense and so you should expect to be considered ‘on company time’ the whole time you are away.

For example, if you were indulging in an activity, which while legal in the country you are staying in is not legal in your home country and you were injured or required treatment – how would that look to your employers. Also would your employer’s medical insurance cover you, how would it be dealt with by HR during your annual review process?

A frequent example of this in the UK, is the use of cannabis when in Amsterdam on business, I have no idea of the frequency of hospitalisation due to cannabis use – although I can image the career fallout if you were.

1. HR would be involved as the Medical insurance would have to notify them of your condition – do you know all the HR processes of your company and whether this is a disciplinary offence as it might count as bringing the company into disrepute

2. HR would have to inform your line management of your condition – depending on your track record this can be either embarrassing, devastating or worse – the final nail in the coffin

3. Since you were indulging in something which is illegal in your country of origin, are you covered by the company insurance?

This is not an exhaustive list of the things I have learnt in my years of travelling, and this really only covers the last 5 years of travel through airports – I have another 5 years of travelling in a car to draw upon for more lessons.

Hopefully this has given you some insight into how I travel and perhaps given you some hints.

Category: Capgemini, Interesting, Lifestream /

The unintended consequences of compromise – how not to screw up later by fixing something now

BoobBoo / April 4, 2011 / No comments

During projects we are all faced with problems and have to find solutions to them, these solutions can range from the very simple to the complex. Quite often though these solutions require some form of compromise, which at the time can be acceptable but later turn into a millstone.

During a recent project I was involved in, the project had many challenges around provision of servers to perform Proof of Concept (PoC) upgrades.
The client was trying to run the project at breakneck speed and the hosting partner was not able keep up, although in my experience this is a function of hosting partners and not any particular individual. Because of this difficulty in providing servers within the hosting partner, the client decided to utilize their internal capability, which on the face of it was a perfect solution. This blog will explain why this was not the solution it appeared to be and why governance around this decision is critical.

The client was undergoing an ECC 6 Upgrade and Unicode conversion from 4.7, they had been on Intel Itanium processors – therefore using IA64 chipsets and binaries. The new environment they were moving to within the hosting partner’s data centre was based on the new Intel Nahalem processor – using the X64 chipsets and binaries. As I have blogged before, having a PoC at the beginning of a project is vital, as it validates a number of things which are vital to moving the project into the development phases. But what happens when you are not able to run your PoC in the way you intend to run your later phases.

Obviously it is heavily dependant upon what factors are limiting your ability to run the process you want to. In my case it was a combination of kit availability, processing power in the alternative solution, processor architecture differences.

The table below details these differences more fully

The table above was part of the output in defining our objectives and how these differences would affect our ability to use the results from the PoC.
This analysis yielded the table below, which shows the objective of the PoC, the challenge, the analysis of how useful the outcome would be and the importance of the objective.

The analysis was used to ensure that the solutions we were using did not invalidate the PoC, this subsequent analysis yielded the table below. Using the table the project was able to show how it would mitigate the risks and issues of not executing the exact process planned for Production and also the effect it had later in the project.

As shown above, most of our objectives could be met, but items specific to timings were impossible to validate properly. As a result the project team were not able to properly validate them until the 1st Trial cutover when we were working with Production data volumes and Production hardware.

This ambiguity caused several headaches to the project,

1. We were not able to give the business a full breakdown of the timings to justify our downtime requirement

2. The Steering committee has to ‘trust’ the project team that downtime had been properly extrapolated

3. The project team had to keep the faith the whole way through the project that we could bring the process in within the agreed window

During projects, clear governance is essential when making decisions like these – it protects people and the project, it should prevent issues descending into a ‘blame culture’ when previous decisions have negative consequences later.
The project used Sharepoint as a way of providing public access to the Risk and Issue logs, it also instituted a Decision log as a way of keeping track of the multitude of decisions made during the project.Using tools like Sharepoint are a very easy way to provide structure to certain project functions. For this project, using the decision log to record items like1. The stakeholders involved in the decision
2. The decision required
3. What the options are
4. What the decision taken was or the next action to be taken in order to reach a decisionSharepoint enabled a transparency that cannot be achieved with spreadsheets, when updating the decision in the log, the previously defined stakeholders are notified of any changes to a document that they are linked to. This enables them to check and verify any information relating to their work.

Project governance, in my opinion, not fun or sexy, but it is essential to the smooth running of a project. I will also put my own hand up as being a poor practitioner of project governance – better than I used to be for sure, but that’s by learning the hard way.

Category: Capgemini, Project Stuff /