Friends.
 
We used to be an IS organization where every member of the
Support/Development staff was responsible for the whole development cycle.
This inlcuded ongoing troubleshooting assistance and maintenance. What I am
saying is that staff members took ownership of the complete support for
different systems. The Operations group mostly administered several hosts
and LAN servers.
 
Now the complexity and additional responsibility of Voice and Data
communications, plus the integration with another IS group from another
facility gives us the opportunity to change the organizational structure.
 
Broadly speaking, two groups will be created. One will be in charge of  the
Operations, Communications, System Administration, and
Infrastructure(including PCs), while the other will be responsible for
Software Development and Support .
 
The old way of doing things forces a couple of hard choices. Some
responsibilities are not that easy to split between the two groups.
 
Specifically:
1)Which group is responsible for the Operating System UPGRADES?
2)How is the Validation or Quality Assurance function handled?
3)Who takes care of the PC side on Client/Server applications? ?
 
My best guess so far is that the physical implementation of an Operating
System upgrade belongs to Operations, while the evaluation and approval to
install it comes from the Development group. (Oh, I forgot to mention that
there are no hosts dedicated for development only.)
 
On validation, I am assuming that the Operations group should have resources
with the necessary skills to develop testing scenarios along with users,
validate the changes, approve them and move to the operational environment.
 
This rises one very important question.
 
Do you have personnel with Programming/Analysis skills dedicated to the
Operations group?
 
Any comments (private or thru the list), are appreciated.
 
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