Beginning Oracle Database 11g Administration From Novice to Professional

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CHAPTER 15 THE BIG PICTURE AND THE TEN DELIVERABLES
They facilitate knowledge transfer. “Tribal knowledge” is lost when the members
of the tribe leave to join other tribes or is forgotten with the passage of time; written
documentation is more permanent. “Tribal knowledge” is also subject to the
“Telephone” game phenomenon. 5
They reduce risk. SOPs reduce the risk of things going wrong. These risks are exacerbated
when the regular performers are unavailable because of vacations, illness,
resignation, and so on. Mistakes made by IT departments in large organizations
often make the front page of the newspaper.
They improve employee morale. Employee morale is high if the organization works
well. A dysfunctional organization has low employee morale.
They reduce blame games. It’s hard to blame a performer for following a wellestablished
SOP. Responsibility for failure transfers from the performer to the SOP.
Of course, the SOP needs to be improved for the next time around.
They improve customer satisfaction. The previous advantages would satisfy almost
anybody, but we cannot neglect to mention that SOPs must inevitably improve
customer satisfaction. Which customer would not be satisfied with your attention
to detail?
A common excuse for not writing SOPs is that most tasks are “simple enough.” Consider
the “simple task” of shutting down a database. Why does a custom SOP need to be written
for this “simple task” or customized for each individual database? How customized, one
might ask, can this “simple task” get? Well, the procedures for shutting down a database
depend on the Oracle database version, the operating system, any high availability mechanisms
such as VCS, HP Serviceguard, and Sun Cluster, and Oracle components such as RAC
and ASM. And, here are some of the things a DBA might have to do before actually pressing
the buttons that shut down the database:
or indirectly impacted.
5. “Telephone” is a game in which each participant whispers a sentence to the next. Errors begin to accumulate
and the last participant receives a highly garbled version of the original sentence.