Trickle-down impact planning

We introduced the concept of The Trickle-down Effect last year, an effect that sees the most minor changes trickling down through an OSS stack, with much bigger consequences than expected.

The trickle-down effect can be insidious, turning a nice open COTS solution into a beast that needs constant attention to cope with the most minor of operational changes. The more customisations made, the more gnarly the beast tends to be.”

Here’s an example I saw recently. An internal business unit wanted to introduce a new card type into the chassis set they managed. Speaking with the physical inventory team, it seemed the change was quite small and a budget was developed for the works… but the budget (dollars / time / risk) was about to blow out in a big way.

The new card wasn’t being picked up in their fault-management or performance management engines. It wasn’t picked up in key reports, nor was it being identified in the configuration management database or logical inventory. Every one of these systems needed interface changes. Not massive change obviously, but collectively the budget blew out by 10x and expedite changes pushed out the work previously planned by each of the interface development and testing teams.

These trickle-down impacts were known…. by some people…. but weren’t communicated to the business unit responsible for managing the new card type. There’s a possibility that they may not have even added the new card type if they realised the full OSS cost consequences.

Are these trickle-down impacts known and readily communicated within your OSS change processes?

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