A New Spin on Policy Creation at The Planet
May 2, 2008 by Scott King, Data Center Operations in The Planet
One of the great aspects of being in a new operations role is the ability to take a look at policies and procedures with a fresh eye. As the new senior director of Data Center Operations at The Planet, that’s been one of my first priorities.
I have never been a fan of policies written by senior executives and then simply rolled out with a directive to follow. For any policy to be effectively implemented, I contend that the team that must follow these policies should have a hand in helping to craft the policies or at least understand why the policies were created. More importantly, these processes come together through the team, rather than from a single individual’s effort. The best method I have seen for this comes from the Six Sigma Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) methodology.
In our data centers, we have created a Continuous Process Review (CPR) team made up of technicians, supervisors and managers across multiple cities. This team is solely responsible for the review and creation of all operations policies, processes and procedures across our six data centers.
The results from our team’s work together have been outstanding. In the last two months, we have produced new and/or updated policies for operational functions like ticket prioritization, technical escalations and management escalations. Since all levels of the data center operations organization are represented, the response to the new policies has been fantastic.
I owe many thanks to all the people who have participated on this new CPR team. None of this could have been achieved without their hard work and dedication.
The Planet’s goal is to provide the best customer experience in the hosting industry, and the data center operations team plays a huge role in that experience. Our ability to adapt to the evolving hosting landscape and respond directly to customer feedback is instrumental in improving the way our data centers run, so if you have any suggestions with regard to our data center policies and procedures, please let me know.
-Scott
