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Production Control
The Production Control organization back in the seventies was best known for their hard-nosed dictator-like attitude. They were branded the gatekeepers to the mission-critical data center. Their primary function then and now is ensuring RAS for the production environment. The primary difference between the 20th century version of the Production Control group and today's Production Control organization is their new attitude. Today this group needs to be customer-service oriented. They still have to police, but in a politically correct manner. The processes that this group designs, implements, and enforces to support the production environment must be user-friendly and cost-effective. They need to communicate, communicate, and over-communicate with their internal customers. The functions of the Production Control group include the following:
Providing level 2 production support.
Rejecting new applications or major revisions to applications for production until after thorough testing and documentation.
Participating in disaster-recovery process/drills.
Breeding ground for technical resources.
Providing centralized ownership/accountability for key processes such as change management, storage management, production acceptance, version control, etc.
Maintaining system management tools.
Assisting senior systems programmers with installation, support, and documentation.
Providing training to other groups within IT on newly installed system management tools.
Responsible for scheduling administration.
Responsible for backup administration.
Responsible for designing, implementing, and reporting on Service Level Agreements.
Responsible for special initiatives (marketing, benchmarking services, and so on).
Production Control also acts as technical liaison among the programming staff, user community, database administrators, systems administrators, and computer operations to resolve production problems, implement new systems, and make changes to existing systems.