Common Sense: required for IT

As I sit here with the extra time I have this evening I should be working on my book, but my feeling is this subject has more merit at this time.

During my drive home tonight I got a call from one of the many friends I have made in the IT community throughout my career. We have both served in management and engineering roles within different organizations. Somehow or another we touched on the subject of what more or less boils down to common sense and how a lot of people seem to lack it.

As IT professionals we have a duty of sorts to be as proactive as possible in creating the best user experience possible, while protecting the organization to it’s fullest. No, we don’t wear spandex and a cape, nor are we a superhero. We are just simply doing our job.

The modern business as we know it is completely dependent on technology. Up time and reliability is crucial to the operations of that business. When we make changes we need to have a strategy, game plan if you will. This strategy should included projected downtime, projected system or user impact, backup, and always have a contingency plan. Plan B is almost more important than Plan A. Once we make a change we need to make sure that we test, document, notify, and monitor those changes. Should we have an issue we need to either a) roll back b) fix the issues exponentially. In the past for example, when doing a large system upgrade I have cloned the previous system, or simply pulled the drive out of the old system to makesure I had a copy of it exactly the way it was.

When we make changes and don’t document them then we can find ourselves in sticky situations.

This is the common sense part: If you make a change to a system and start experiencing a problem with the system shortly there after roll your change back. Don’t scratch your head, don’t delay, and don’t ask why. Just put it back. My favorite saying in the world is “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.”

As IT professionals it is never our intention to cause undue harm to the organization, but sometimes our actions have consequences not even we could foresee. The true test though of our abilities and skill-set, and more than anything common sense, is how do we react or handle that situation.

There is no excuse for a lacking of common sense. If you make a change, and something related to that doesn’t work the following day, common sense has to say it was probably your change.