Friday, June 23, 2006

System Rollout & Contingency

System: Auto Water-Refill System (AWRS) for Wong's Family Fish-tank EcoSystem (WFFES)

Business Case:
  • critical function - may have serious impact to at least 8 lives in the WFFES (including "Lemon Wong", "Yellow Wong", "Big Bride", "Small Bride", "Dory", a "doctor", a "dustman", a black "illegal immigrant") and may ruin the environment of the WFFES (e.g. the "Grass", and both Big Bride and Small Bride's home)
  • heavily relied on a single system operator to operate the function manually
  • most importantly, the system operator will be on vacation for 2.5 weeks starting from Jun 24 (that triggers the implementation of the System)
  • with this new system in place, it is targeted to have a new part-time system operator to "manage" the WFFES every 3-4 days
Planned Rollout Date: June 24, 2006 (Note: hard deadline, cannot be postponed)

Current Status (as of Jun 23): 3-days of test run failed, cannot proceed "production cutover" for the AWRS

Failure Reason(s):
  • schedule delay (late procurement of production/testing equipment, which delayed the testing cyle)
  • inadequate time for testing and fixing the problem (under-estimate?)
Contingency Plan:
  • the function will be managed by the part-time system operator manually every 2 days during the critical period (supposedly, this task should be done twice every day. As advised by the SME, "every 2 days" is the best option to maintain the WFFES effectively for the part-time operator)
Next Action(s):
  • document the manual procedures if necessary
  • conduct a quick skill transfer session shortly by today
  • deploy the contingency plan starting June 24

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