What I'm getting at is that after following this thread for a while, I'm not convinced any amount of process-borrowing is going to solve problems better, faster, or even avoid them in the first place. At best, our craft is 1/3rd as "old" (if that's somehow I measure of maturity) as flight and nobody is being sued to settle 200+ accidental deaths because of our mistakes.
-Tk
Not now, that is true, but when you look at things that are "on the drawing board" such as systems designed to manage automobile traffic flows, networks that are used to fly UAVs, networks that keep track of "friendly" units in combat where the technology might someday migrate to civilian law enforcement and/or emergency services (keeping track of where firefighters are in a building or at a wildfire, for example), I can see situations in the future where people's lives could be dependent on networks working properly, or at least endangered if a network fails. But my original intent was to point out that there are two kinds of process for two different kinds of circumstances and the sort of process surrounding routine changes might not be the best process for handing emergency changes. I have seen examples of places that want to handle emergency changes with the same sort of process they use for routine changes and those places can be frustrating to work with when stuff is broken. My goal was to give managers of networks who might read this the idea that when the fan is in an unsavory condition, more can get done by shifting from a mode of questioning, analyzing and second-guessing everything the engineer is doing to a mode where the organization is responding to immediate needs, clearing obstacles out of the way, and documenting as best they can what is done and when, to make the debriefing afterwards easier. AFTER the incident is the time to go over what was done, think about how it was dealt with, consider any changes in emergency process that might have shortened the duration, etc. In fact the "What could we have done differently that would have shortened the duration of the outage" question is pretty important. The answer might be "nothing", and that is ok, too, but the question should be asked.