Durga Temple, Joshi Wadevale and Hyderabadi House !!!!!!!!

This Sunday, was Quite different, needless to say Sans music, Sans snooker and without those punks around, this Sunday marked a new beginning. I may call it a second Innings, Read a lot of Technical stuff through out the morning and put the brain to use after a long time, might be for the first time after 99, yes after those glorious school days, precisely March 15 1999. I jumped up from the chair and pumped my fists I could still recollect what I had learned in Trigonometry and also to huge extend Physics as well, the feel was out of the world, sheer joy !!!!!

To add icing to the cake, I decided to roam around the city , not M.G.Road, not to K.P or Camp but this time to a Temple, It's the temple of Goddess Kali's avatar and I would say it was mind blowing. The walk up the stairs, the calmness in the air, Kids running around, the flower vendors, just another world, where pleasure is long lasting, pains healed to a higher extend and Subconscious talking through the layer of a calmer conscious self. Climb up the stairs was not that tough but, the way up was kind of confusing as the steps lead you to one corner and then takes a steep turn towards the summit. The way up almost looked as if it was a park, could see couples everywhere, Some with Kids and some without. Kids added to the beauty, most of them for the first time realized that world is a place where they could run, Jump and fall down.I could see Kid's enjoying the most, flat's can only offer the 24/7 Security and a lift; but a childhood spent with nature Quite a dream!!!!. I remembered my childhood, with mom asking me to come out of the pond, then marching through the bushes with food in her hands asking me to have it there (It's fun to eat sitting on an Inflated tube, on the sides of a pond), at last coming to fetch me herself and after that the infamous hue and cry !!!!!. The Ganesha temple on the way up was another highlight, The Goddess was simply sensational, I sat spoke to myself and took resolutions, which might stay more than the usual Sunday swearing s !!!!.

With no plans and a cool head, I joined hands with my only partner till date, My Bike. Riding is fun and the weather made it a pleasure, The ride took me to "Joshi Wadevale", which I never saw till date, though FC Road is my second home in Pune. Vada Paav has a different version all together here, there are add ons and plug gins available other than the usual green chilly. I could not believe the fact that Even Vada Paav can be customized to this extend. Pune is vibrant, with a hep crowd, youngsters all over, you will never feel old here, but the City has it's own charm well above the hep and the "Yo" culture. Understanding takes time, I took six months ; so what , "I understood " and that's what is important.

ITIL - The Ticket Bouncers !!!!!

Saturday Night, Heavy Music, Metal, Hard Rock what not, With proportion of Alcohol increasing in the veins, as the mind gets Mischievous, Fantasies grow wings, we see a bunch of men who bring us back to the ground, Our very own bouncers. This post is not about them, it's very much about work, the first time I thought that work must be a subject of Blogs, It turned me off. But looking at the Characters you meet, the people you deal with, the challenges you face, might be my perspective ; though presented in a crude way can make life easy for people. Mostly for those who work in IT support, Infrastructure or for those who follow the new Bible of IT organizations ITIL.

Incidents are nothing but the documented agony of a human being who comes to work, the agony when becomes an epidemic becomes severe otherwise remains what it is just another "Incident". Requests I would say is the user filling in forms that would grant him future agonies or agonies before even he gets the service. Imagine a user who runs around with forms, behind his manager, that too in the dark, he tumbles down, falls, gets hurt and at last gets the service. A well managed ticketing system, will get half the job done in an Infrastructure, with leaders believing that Remedy is actually a remedy for their issues, pushing messages to the resolver groups could have been much more easier.

People have their own ways of getting things done, a guy from sales and marketing would always call the desk and talk about getting the job done with in minutes ( Mostly a bargain), where in some one from Quality assurance would ask about what all processes are involved in getting the task done, Some one from IT would explain that it's just about pushing a policy into the firewall and the time taken for that is Excruciatingly high. Customers come with Expectations and these are mainly mapped to their domain and meeting all these without hurting any ones emotion's is the key, key to the business of IT Service Management.

Service Desk, the middleman is always compelled to play a diplomatic role, washing hands off before and after food and while doing the job is a common problem that we face on a daily basis. But that's what keeps us in the job!!!!!. If you sort words that will be used heavily and followed lightly " Ownerhsip" will be a winner, with the Silver Medalist miles and miles away. Incidents assigned to teams would come back to us like a rubber ball on the wall, comments ranging from " Working from my end check from user's end" , " Issue not with our team" , " Check with the network team, might be a connectivity issue" are common.Incidents / Tickets that would say why it is not an issue with ones team will be a rarity, those will go to a museum directly. (Framed and Worshiped)

To manage an Infrastructure right, the only thing the management needs to do is to monitor the health of the Core ITIL Processes. Count of incidents logged, closed, pending, missed SL, Team wise / Manager Wise will tell who is getting the job done and not. A daily call with defaulters would bring down user dissatisfaction to Zero. Incidents reoccurred daily / Weekly and permanent fixes if tracked will lead to Incident reduction. Capacity planning with Dash boards of user base per application, Usage in terms of Bandwidth, Time , Response times within the Lan and over the wan with proper inputs to problem team will tackle those Slow performance Issues. Changes raised by capacity keeping an eye on future incidents will tell us the Quality work done and would show on less number of Incidents,Example(Incidents which cropped up as another application was added to the agony of a already suffering database).SLA without OLA is like an "underwear without elastic", the vendors, internal customers must be accountable to each other, an environment where my job not being done will make me answer to 10 different people will bring Pro-activeness for sure.

ITIL processes are like a chain and a chain is only strong as the weakest link, for an implementation to be Successful, the processes must be reviewed as a whole not Individually. For Example a discussion were the number of Problem Tickets raised by Incident Management is reviewed, Number of Changes raised by Capacity team is taken into account (Capacity Dashboard pointing at peaks and lows of Critical apps), SLA missed is accounted on the basis of OLA's agreed, Changes raised and implemented as part of the Incident Problem Life Cycle are reviewed and evaluated will make an Infrastructure much more healthier. What most Organisations might be missing out will be this holistic view of this new approach , or are we promoting the Hindustani way of building walls between departments with the Slogan " Tu 13 Dekh ".

Service Management Where Love is War !!!!!!

Sharad Pawar would not know what a bouncy pitch is, but he knows how to Run BCCI, Lalu Yadav never Learned Project Management, Cost Management or anything but he ran the Indian Railways, Ganguly never scored on the field but the team won the game over and over again. A world were people do things in domains that even their forefathers would not have Imagined. Welcome to Service Management.

If you think that to lead a fight, you need to have fought before,then my dear friends;Service Management will prove you wrong. To get the job done, you must have done it before is again a wrong statement, to involve in the Problem and to address the problem are two entirely different things. It's fun to hear words that you would not have heard in your entire life and act as if you are comfortable with it, It's fun when people who have spent their whole life working, sleeping on AIX having to listen to the "gyan" given by kids, who have not even touched the system once !!!!!!. Welcome to Service Management, the new heights of techno commercial, techno lingual career path. Man, Money and Machine are three aspects of any business. If you can manage the man, set his thoughts right, align him to the needs of business and deliver the services, that is what Service Management does.

Life takes it's on turns and I never knew the quest for a morning job will land me in a 24/7 job. Where Credit Management is subject to be learned and mastered, your efforts, if it has to be yours, even your sweat to should drop on the right carpets. Service Management is where Love is War. where you would haunt your colleagues and give them Nightmares. Efforts never Quantified, Results of efforts conceptual, Emotional and often tagged on people who are backseat drivers.

Being in the middle of Chaos being the key KRA, the only person whom you can yell at is your own image and that too if you have time to look at the mirror. Support groups wanting to resolve issues from the root, Process team wanting approvals to be in place, Technical Managers wanting the Logs' s and backup's in place, Restoring the services is like waging a war, were people tag you as a Pakistani, where in you are very much an Indian. Con calls starting from a professional mode, ending up in a kinder garden mode, Minutes of meetings getting forgotten in minutes, Processes moaning as they get raped over and over again, they will all take shapes and sizes in front of you.

Calls at the middle of the night, will wake you with problem statements close to titles of Bollywood Hits " Kuch Kuch Hota Hai" ( There is something happening ), Calls that will remind you of the Lokh Sabha and Rajya Sabha, were truth is a kid with no father and Problem does not have a mother, Calls that will make you feel confident that politics has a different level all together, might be Rahul Gandhi should use it as a test environment. From people who panic when there is a problem, from people whose calmness makes you panic when there is a problem, you can see a new world, where information passed and supplied makes you deliver and not deliver.Your hue and cry at the initial phase of an issue hits a world renowned IVR which every resolver group has " Our system is Taka tak", to by pass that " shamelessness " is the first qualification you need. Skin must have an ISI mark so that taunts do not go through it, were chauvinism of people are always shown to these nomads who own nothing but at the end of the day are answerable for everything.

Life goes on, Belief in the fact that technology will change, people's mentality towards work won't. The simple fact that technology depended business, cannot survive without this new breed, Managing technology has taken a new face, but be ready before you enter this,beware ; it is a one way road, Here respect is not on how much you know, it's on how much you can be diplomatic, Not on how much you deliver but how much you portray that you are delivering. Welcome to the Stickiest wicket I have ever played, May be it's Durban or Dubai, Pune or Perth, It's all about delivering when the fire is there !!!!!!