Table of Contents
Advertisement
Change control
High-Level process flow for emergency change
management
Unfortunately, not all situations that occur in a network environment are conducive to the
extensive research and planning described in the previous section. Sometimes you must make
more immediate changes to restore network connectivity following a network outage.
The procedures that you put in place to handle emergency changes should be flexible enough
to facilitate rapid resolution of the problem, including documentation of who is authorized to
make emergency changes to the network, and how to contact these individuals. You should
either have a sufficient number of people who can resolve network emergencies, or those
people should be easily accessible at all times to prevent a roadblock in the problem resolution
process.
It is critical to maintain both communication and the integrity of documentation through an
emergency change. This is the time when documentation is needed most, so documenting the
steps that are taken to resolve the problem is very important.
Finally, when considering changes, you should think about not only whether the change will
resolve the existing problem, but also whether the change will cause other network problems.
Steps that are critical for an emergency change process are shown in the process flow below.
In this section, the topics covered are:
Issue determination
Limited risk assessment
Communication
Documentation
Implementation
Test and evaluation
Issue determination
It is usually obvious when an emergency change is required. However, exactly what change is
required may not be obvious. For Avaya equipment, you should include the appropriate Avaya
Services personnel in the troubleshooting process. In many cases, problems with Avaya
equipment will be fixed by Avaya Services expert systems, or a technician will be dispatched
before users are aware of the problem.
When taking corrective action, it is imperative that you implement only one change at a time.
Otherwise, if the problem is resolved by multiple changes, it is impossible to pinpoint which
change actually fixed the problem. Or worse, if other problems are introduced, it is impossible to
determine which change was the cause of the new fault. Each change should go through the full
process outlined above before you begin on the next change. If a change is shown to have no
effect, you should back out of it before you begin the next change. The single exception is when
the initial change is a prerequisite to the next change that is under consideration.
382 Avaya Application Solutions IP Telephony Deployment Guide
Advertisement
Table of Contents
