Are You Creating Checklists?
I’m a true believer in checklists for everything. I use the Getting Things Done framework both in my professional and personal life. But I’m not going to talk about that kind of checklists.
Most sysadmins I know use checklists for their daily work, especially if there is critical work to be done. In particular for systems that requires that they work at 4 am in the morning. For most people that is not the most optimal time for creative thinking and a checklist allows you to follow a simple recipe for getting through the maintenance window. By making a checklist you also need to think about your maintenance window beforehand and this allows you to find flaws in your thinking while not working on that critical server. This process tends to reduce downtime as well because you catch flaws in your thinking early and there are less surprises when you do the actual work early in the morning.
My own checklists usually contains commands that I need to run, outputs that needs to be double checked before moving on and so forth. Many times it has been a life saver particularly if something is not going exactly as planned. It is easy to forget a vital thing when you continue you work but the checklist make sure that you actually get your job done. If possible I always try to do a dress rehearsal on a different system (but a very similar system).
informIT has a sample chapter from The Practice of System and Network Administration about checklists. It is well worth a read and if you don’t own the book I simply can’t recommend it too much.
If you have any good tips regarding checklists feel free to put them in the comment section.
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I use GTD to track all of my SA work, including a few check lists on what to do post outage at 3 am. It’s a great framework to manage SA type work.
If you’re running a Mac, I recommend either Omnifocus or iGTD for GTD fans.
greeno, thanks for the recommendations. Personally I’ve never really got along well with any of the pre-made GTD applictions and I use a simple homemade python script to handle mine. I should probably try one of web based one, like nozbe or vitalist.
I use RT for most of my project tracking. I like it because it has a good balance between structure and flexibility. Also, us unix admins can sometimes be a little isolated from the rest of an organization and collaborative tools help make it more clear what projects we’re working on.
–Erek Dyskant
[…] at Aspiring Sysadmin has an article about using checklists. It’s solid advice. I typically call them procedures instead of checklists, but it amounts to […]