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Production Control = Infrastructure QA

  • Sep 7, 2001
If your infrastructure doesn't include a production control function, you're suffering from a lack of quality assurance. Although the production control group may seem old-fashioned, there are a lot of good reasons why this structure works, and why you need it.
Placing special emphasis on a comprehensive approach combining organization, people, process, and technology, Harris Kern's Enterprise Computing Institute is recognized as one of the world's premier sources for CIOs and IT professionals concerned with managing information technology.
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What Is Production Control?

The production control organization was established in the early 1970s to provide a QA function for the legacy environment. These were its functions:

  • Provide second-level production support

  • Participate in the disaster recovery process/drills

  • Reject new applications or major revisions to applications in production prior to thorough testing and documentation

  • Breed technical resources

  • Maintain scheduling requirements

  • Provide centralized ownership/accountability for key processes such as change management, storage management, etc.

  • Maintain system management tools

  • Assist senior systems programmers in installation, support, and documentation

  • Provide training to other groups within IT on newly installed system management tools

The staff was best known for their hard-nosed dictator attitude. They were branded the gatekeepers to the mission-critical data center environment.

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