The Planet Blog

At The Planet, we work in a continuous-improvement environment, always looking for new ways to improve our operations and our service. One of the recent changes we’ve implemented in Data Center Operations is a new 12-hour schedule for all data center technicians and supervisors.

With the new schedule, our employees work 12 hours each day in a two-week rotation. In one week they’ll work three days, followed by four days the following week. These schedules actually provide more people on each shift throughout the entire day, and also eliminate wasted time overlaps between shifts and days with double staff.

Every technician affected by the schedule change alternates three- and four-day weekends. Because the shifts are longer, each technician comes into the office seven out of every 14 days, compared with 10 out of every 14 days with the old schedules. The new schedule also streamlines our support communications, especially with regard to ownership and handoffs. We’re eliminating a few shift changes in the middle of the day, so projects and tickets aren’t as likely to bounce between shifts. Not only is this a benefit to our customers, our employees like the additional freedom it provides.

The efficiencies gained from the new schedules will reduce our data center operations costs by approximately $500,000 a year. With that savings, we can fund new positions and projects to improve service. It also increases our efficiency and effectiveness, which are two of the most important mantras in any “operations” handbook.

We’ve implemented the new schedules in four of the six data centers so far, with the final two migrating to the new schedules within the next few weeks. The feedback from the technicians and management staff in the first four data centers has been overwhelmingly positive.

I’d like to personally thank all of our helpful and open-minded technicians who have allowed us to make a significant change in their lives. Our success is fundamentally tied to the team’s 100 percent commitment to the new structure, and we couldn’t be happier with the results.

-Scott

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