Systems reviews

Walking the building before opening a laptop

The review starts on foot, because a network drawn from a management console describes the equipment that answers and says nothing about the equipment that does not. The walk covers the comms cupboard, the meter cupboard, the space above the suspended ceiling if there is one, and every room where a cable disappears into a wall without an obvious destination.

What tends to surface on that walk is ordinary rather than dramatic: a second switch daisy-chained off the first so that two more desks could be added one summer, a wireless access point fitted facing the wrong way across a yard, a desktop machine under the stairs that turns out to be running the stock system, and one cable in a cupboard that everybody is afraid to move.

Each of those is photographed, located in words, and written into the review with the room it sits in, because a device that has a location has an owner and a device without one has neither.

The machine under the stairs is always the one running something important, and it is always the one with a towel over the fan.

The six readings, and what each one records

The readings are taken in a fixed order, because each answer narrows the next question and an answer taken out of order usually has to be taken again.

The ordinary Tuesday

A description of the working day in the words of the people doing it: which system takes an order, which file is opened first in the morning, and which job stops entirely when the network is unavailable. This is recorded before any equipment is examined, so that the equipment is judged against the work rather than against a catalogue.

Where the data lives

Every set of records the business depends upon, with its physical or hosted location named. Hosted means the records sit on a supplier's equipment reached over the internet, and the review names the supplier, the account the tenancy sits under, and the person at the client who is able to open a ticket with them.

Identity and access

The list of accounts, which of them belong to people who have left, and whether administrative rights, meaning the ability to change the system rather than merely use it, are shared between several people or held by one. Shared administrative accounts are recorded by name, because a shared account cannot be traced to a person after the fact.

The path from the desk to the data

Router, switch, wireless access points and the internet circuit, drawn as they physically run rather than as they were once intended to run. The circuit speed is measured on the day and written down with the time of the measurement, since a speed quoted from a contract and a speed observed at four in the afternoon are frequently different numbers.

Backup and restore

Treated as two readings in one line, because a backup is a copy that was made and a restore is a copy that was proved to open. The review records what is copied, how often, where the copy is kept, and the date of the last occasion on which a copy was opened and read.

Licences and support

Renewal dates, the party responsible for each system, and the address the renewal notice arrives at. This reading exists because renewal notices tend to arrive at the inbox of whoever placed the original order, and that is frequently somebody who left two years ago.

What the document contains when it is handed over

The output is a single written review, not a dashboard and not a licence to keep coming back. It is written so that an engineer who has never visited the building could act on it, which is the same standard as writing it for the client.

• The inventory in context. Every device with its room, its address on the network, what depends on it, and what happens to the working day if it stops.
• The single points of failure. Named plainly, with the consequence of each stated in hours of lost work rather than in severity ratings.
• The access position. Who holds which account, which accounts are dormant, and where the credential register lives, meaning the list of accounts and the record of where each password is kept.
• The measured figures. Circuit speed, the size of the data on each system, and the time a full copy currently takes, all with the date they were taken.
• The short list of decisions. The two or three choices the business genuinely has to make, each written as a question with its cost in time, so that the decision belongs to the client.

What is useful to have ready

A review runs faster when three things are to hand on the day: the name of the internet provider and the account reference, access to whoever set the systems up originally even if that is a phone number rather than a person in the room, and half an hour with the person who does the invoicing. The last of those is the most useful, because invoicing touches more systems than any other job in a small business and the person doing it knows exactly which screen is slow.

Where none of that exists, the review still runs. It simply spends its first hour establishing what would otherwise have been handed over in five minutes, and the review says so, so that the client can see where the time went.