Jasmine Web Starter

This year seems to be flying by so fast, and during these last few months we have been seeing a repeating trend with the same type of business problems and questions coming around again and again.

All of these problem areas though are much easier to solve before the problem arises. With a little bit of forward planning and maybe some written guidelines or notes, you can be prepared for both Planned and even Unplanned Work tasks when they occur and need urgent attention.

Not sure what we mean by Planned and Unplanned Work? No worries we explain about this in our previous article Future planning.

We understand its so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that if after everything is setup, or if we don't make any changes, things will just keep forever running smoothly. Unfortunately that's never the case long term.

Now depending on the size of your company you may have a team of staff to worry and take care of this problem. But time after time we hear of companies that have not planned, or think someone has it defined as a task only to find out it was never done only ever talked about.

So lets explore these Planned and Unplanned Work areas together, with the tasks that can turn urgent at any time, causing critical problems for your business.

We plan to just cover just a few of the most common areas that we've heard companies having real problems with over the last two month.

Down time

Whatever service or product your website or business system relies on will fail, but its how you deal with the issue that makes you stand out to your customers and staff.

The good news for your staff is it may not always be an issue that they need to fix if the problem is with a hosting or cloud provider. Just be aware you might still need to carry out some work to be up and running again to how you were before their problem occurred.

But it is your task to keep your customers informed of the problem and what's causing it, to help manage their expectations of your services.

• Firstly you need a way of finding out before or at the same time as your customers of any problem.
• Then how do you communicate this problem to your customers.
• How do you follow up after the event to see if you can learn from the last problem and if it makes sense for the business to look at a way to cover your company for next time.

Urgent updates

Depending how your systems are setup and hosted you may not need to take care of platform OS (Operating Systems) updates and patches.

But if you are using a CMS (Content Management System), also if that CMS allows Addins, themes (Themes may also have dependencies), or is using a database to store information. Then you will need to understand how to find out what updates are available to install and how to install them.

Plus if an update does not work, or it causes an issue with an Addin that you really rely on. How can you uninstall or restore back to the earlier version whilst the issue is looked into?

Backup and restore

Do you have a backup plan or maybe a plan to redeploy from a master code base?

A back up is only any good if you have tested that you can restore from it.

Its also a great idea to have clearly defined steps to follow, so make sure that you have recorded the steps to carry out before you run the restore. Plus any steps that are needed after the restore has run. Also having a clear understanding of how far back in time your backup sets will allow you to go.

If you are able to redeploy from a master code base again, it makes it much more straight forward if you have a clear playbook (Defined steps) to follow from. Covering what needs to be configured first, then how the code/contents is deployed to the new service, and what should happen after that.

If you need to update a DNS record or nameservers. Where are the login details? Is everyone clear with how to update these records and the time needed for updates to take effect?

A business should also take care of who is trained to do this restore, as you might need to restore it when that person is on holiday or ill.

Its also important to make sure you are storing your back image sets in a secure place only accessible to your staff and not everyone on the web. This is a common area of a lot of data breaches.

Product or service discontinued

When choosing products and services its easy to fall into the thinking this will be available forever, only to find out a few months later this is not the case!

This can sometimes be challenging if your dependencies are not clearly defined and fully understood. Or if you have locked your system into one company's custom system instead of working in open standards that are available across the web.

It can also be very hard to plan for, but having an up to date picture of similar services and products goes a long way to only making this a bit of a pain to deal with, rather than a real business problem.

Sometimes providers will offer an update path within their notice email, but you really should ask yourself how comfortable you are with using another service from that provider. If the service has been replaced with a newer version then that might be a little more straight forward to keep the same provider.

Missing key staff members.

With staff members maybe on holiday, ill or moving on to a new job offer.

Business functions still need to work and be looked after. This is where notes of setup details and written working task steps can really set your company on the right footing, keeping it moving forward.

Some setup and configuration steps can now be defined in code, this then gives you repeatable results with each run, but staff still need to understand how and when to use these tools. This is commonly know as Infrastructure as code (IaC) or Configuration As Code (CaC) which can be really useful if you have to restore or setup new services.

In closing whilst thinking about Future Savings

I hope that we have given you an overview of some of areas to check in your business, yes it requires a little time up front but the savings going forward in terms of money and time are outstanding.

You might be thinking that we should have defined each of the above areas in more detail along with clear steps but every company's system is different, and these are areas your company should explore and have clear plans for that fit your working practices, should you ever need to call upon them.

As always should you have any questions or want more details on any of the areas covered, feel free to reach out to us via our Contact form.

Maybe you think we have missed a key area that should be defined above also, if so Contact us with you view or idea. We would be happy to review and update this page.