New goal - We want to be CMM level 3

For those who don't know CMM stands for 'Capability Maturity Model'. It's a set of standards designed to help an organisations software processes to the point that a software project is easily repeatable. What this actually means is simply the common sense practices will take place instead of the normal panic.
So, right at the start of a software development project proper specifications would be provided, changes to the spec would be monitored and, if required, the schedule for the project will be changed based on known schedule impacts due to schedule changes.
All of this is based on existing projects and on one key item - lessons learnt which should always take place towards the end of a project and be recorded and reviewed for the next project.

CMM levels have next to no bearing on IT management processes. For the IT side of things you have ITIL.

I can sort of see what they are trying to do here, like any set of standards CMM is pretty much common sense.

Briefly, CMM breaks the software development process down into these levels:

1. Initial (chaotic, ad hoc, individual heroics) - the starting point for use of a new process.
2. Managed - the process is managed in accordance with agreed metrics.
3. Defined - the process is defined/confirmed as a standard business process, and decomposed to levels 0, 1 and 2 (the latter being Work Instructions).
4. Quantitatively managed
5. Optimizing - process management includes deliberate process optimization/improvement.

So the basics of CMM can be applied to any process but it's really designed for software development.

Another thing that made me both laugh and cry was when I asked about the 'level 3' were supposed to meet and to confirm that it actually was CMM level three I was told by the meeting chair that he wasn't exactly sure when measurements were being used but knew that by just doing the DR processes for each site we would be granted level 3.

Of course, as soon as the documents are written they are out of date. We also have several data centre moves coming up in seven months so I feel an exercise in futility coming on.

If you are having a meeting please have an agenda and control your meeting

One of my big complaints is that many people do not know how to control a meeting. You see this more in meetings where outside consultants can hijack the meetings and steer them away from the original meeting points because they can and they see a chance for more business.

The key to running a good meeting is to have an agenda and stick to it. It's actually very hard to do this because as a meeting chair, you don't want to be rude and tell someone to  keep to the agenda. Guess what? As meeting chair it's ok to do this and others will thank you.

I'm going to borrow a tip from a colleague:

Everything is either:
   1. An action (write down who for, what and deadline)
   2. An update / fact (write down for future reference)
   3. An open question (see (a))
   4. Something not currently relevant (write down under a section titled “park” or (“to come back to)

Number 4 on that list is probably your most powerful tool as a meeting chair. If someone starts to go off on a tangent you let them have their say for a minute or two, make a note of it then say 'OK, That's interesting and has been noted. Let's move on'. If they come back to the point you just point to the note in the meeting minutes and say 'We've noted that as a parked comment, moving on'.

This way you can stick to the agenda and keep the meeting focused.

Exporting from Exchange mailboxes to PST files is a false economy

I'm sure most network admins have come across that one user who has a huge multi-gigabyte mail file that absolutely cannot have a single email deleted from it.
In these instances the answer many IT departments fall back on is to export some of the data to a PST and put the PST file into another location.

This is a false economy. Please avoid it!! It's a false economy because you'll end up taking up more space. Exchange and most other mail systems have a pretty neat feature called Single Instance Storage. Put simply, if I send a 5MB email to 100 people it'll take up 5MB on the mail server as 100 pointers to a shared object will actually be sent. Total disk space used? Maybe 10MB for the mail, pointers, sent/received information and other overheads.

If those 100 people then export that mail to a PST file it'll take up 500MB (5MB*100) and that data is probably on the users home drive, local drive, pen drive, somewhere else so not only have you lost control of the location of what really could be sensitive data you've also lost the single instance capability of your mail system and wasted space on other systems.

If the user can't be persuaded or taught to delete emails then I'd be inclined to leave them be. At worst I'd give them a storage instance all to themselves. If you are hosting data on a SAN or NAS you should be able to move those storage instances around to best balance the disk space requirements without sacrificing single instance and having some protection around keeping confidential mail items in one place.

Next 6 months targets

At the start of the year the company I work for sets targets for the next six months. These targets often have no bearing on the overall strategy or direction of the team but are down some managers whim or based on a technical article they read that morning.
The targets also often don't follow on from one 6 month period to the next.

For example, one of my targets for the previous 6 months was to dcoument suggestions for a re-org of the OU's in Active Directory. One wasn't actually necessary but upper management caught site of the AD layout and thought it looked a bit untidy. They never asked any questions or sought to understand the layout or even ask if a reorg of the OU's would bring any benefits.

Anyway, one nice result of this was that it was an easy piece of work yet for this bunch of 6 months work I don't actually have 'Implement the suggested OU re-org' as a target which strikes me as just odd.

In the next six months I have to write a document providing options for green computing in the data centers and write another exploring the option of using Windows 2008 HPC in place of Windows 2008 Standard never mind that the licence agreement for HPC specifices that it shouldn't be used in this way.

Sudden Truth

It's a rather sad state of affairs when you realise that the greatest achievement you can claim in a day where a meeting wasn't involved is going to the toilet.