Template for IT Outage Planning

Summary............................................................4
Audience...........................................................5
About this Template................................................6
Overview...........................................................7
1) Initiating the Outage Planning / Initial Request for an Outage..8
     Instructions How to Request an Outage for an IT System........8
     Initial Outage Request Form...................................9

2) Impact- and Dependency Analysis - Evaluation...................11
     External Dependencies and Constraints........................11
     Internal Dependencies and Constraints........................11
     Impact on SLA's / OLA's (Service Level Manager)..............11
     Not very likely, but you definitely don't want that 
                to happen ....(Facility Manager)..................12
     Impact Analysis – Interfaces / System Interconnectivity .....13
     Job Scheduling Dependencies..................................14
     Mitigation: Continuing Business during planned Outage of 
         one IT System (Business Continuity Manager)..............16

3) Impact Analysis - Summary:.....................................18
     Affected Systems.............................................18
     Customer Impact..............................................19
     Impact on internal users and processes.......................19

4) Detailed Planning - Preparing the Outage.......................20
     Staff-Planning non-IT Staff..................................20
     Staff Planning IT Staff and IT Vendors / Support Providers...21
     Create a Contact List........................................22
     To be decided: Prepare Read-Only Copy? (High Risk)...........23

5) Detailed Planning - Create Action Plan ........................25
     The Last Day before the Outage...............................25
     The Last Hours before the Outage.............................25
     Actions during the Outage (Outage Plan)......................26
     Extended Outage if Backout / Rollback required...............28
     After the Outage.............................................29
     Risk Analysis................................................30

6) Approval / Sign Off............................................31