If your manager pretends that they can manage humans without a few well-worn human factor books on their shelf, quit. David On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 5:36 PM, Michael Dillon <wavetossed@googlemail.com> wrote:
The actual error happened when someone was troubleshooting a turn-up, where in the past the customer in question has had their ethertype set wrong. It wasn't a provisioning problem as much as someone troubleshooting why it didn't come up with the customer. Ironically, the NOC was on the phone when it happened, and the switch was rebooted almost immediately and the outage lasted 5 minutes.
This is why large operators have a "ready for service" protocol. The customer is never billed until it is officially RFS, and to make it RFS requires more than an operational network, it also requires the customer to agree in writing that they have a fully functional connection.
This is another way of hiding human error, because now the up-down-up is just part of the provisioning process. There is a record of the RFS date-time so if the customer complains about an outage BEFORE that point, they can be politely reminded that when RFS happened and that charging does not start until AFTER that point.
--Michael Dillon