List of all Templates and Checklists
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
Decision Support Template:
Selecting Disaster Recovery (DR) Technologies
The 70 page base document helps you to define your individual requirements and explains the evaluation criteria.
The 30 page documentation template assists you in documentation of your requirements, assumptions and decisions!
Quick Purchase
Documentation Template / Operations Checklist:
Operating DR-Protected Systems
The replication to DR-site is NOT invisible!
- In a few cases the presence of DR-Protection DOES need attention!
This document helps to identify those maintenance- and operations activities requiring additional steps caused by DR-Protection.
Service Management: Operational Level Agreements (OLA)
Both templates
Enable the Backup Team to prepare Standard (silver, gold, platin)-OLA's!
Help the Service Manager to ask for the appropriate service details
Help the Service Manager to ask for the appropriate service details
This 30+ page template contains a big Service Catalogue for (advanced) DBA-services and Service Levels for the Services offered!
This 50+ page template addresses not only simple standard backup and restore, but additionally special restore situations, backup testing, backup optimization.... - Check the "Table of Contents!" and Product Description!
Self Assessment: Check yourself before Auditors report it!
- Proactive checking for stability issues is important to avoid unplanned outages.
- Documenting those checks provides important evidence that you are operating according best practice.
Because Auditors ask for documented evidence!
All auditors require requires that all duties are clearly assigned (and documented), but especially during SOX (Sarbanes Oxley Act) compliance audits the focus on this topic is even higher than usual.
Real-World Experience shows that the borders between DBA and Application support are astonishing UNclear!
- Don't leave any room for discussion that's "the other, but not we".
- Execute a self assessment using our template - and be prepared for surprise!
If you have just a job role "DBA", but not a dedicated job role "Application DBA" those 19 duties must be explicitly assigned to either "Application Support" or to the "DBA" - otherwise they might not be executed!
Detect unassigned tasks before an auditor reports them !
Requirements Engineering - Ask the right questions early!
NEW! November, 20th 2006: Version 2.0 - 120 additional Requirements!
No matter if you are selecting a software package or if you planning custom development, the requirements must be defined in both cases.
Each requirement detected later costs much more than this template!
(And don't even think about the additional delay...)
(And don't even think about the additional delay...)
More than 270 requirement for availability, reliability, manageability, Backup and Recovery, resuming crashed jobs, configuration requirements, archiving / restore....
Requirements-Checklist and Template for Application Interfaces. It's quite sure that the new application needs to be integrated with existing applications, and that might be a MAJOR part of the project!
Therefore you should ask those important (vendor- and tool independent) questions about the interfaces before selecting and implementing the application !
(Requirements checklist 65 Requirements / 36 pages, template for operational documentation 8 pages)
If you need to migrate data to the new system, then be aware that this might become a major task!
Base Document 24 pages + Template 11 pages
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Use this 65 Questions to reduce the risk of unexpected complications!
Base Document 24 pages + Template 11 pages
Reading this checklist at the very beginning of the project will reveal a lot of steps which otherwise might be forgotten in the time- and budget estimation! This simple checklist with 101 items targets small and new companies with IT-department on a low maturity level and should bridge the time until change management and release management are fully implemented according best practice.
This questionnaire supports the gathering of business requirements by providing a template with detailed questions to be answered and filled in. The template is provided as file to be used with any word processor - this is a distinct advantage compared to printed templates.
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Documentation Templates
Of course you do know that an Operations Manual is mandatory part of the delivery, but you might be surprised about the required effort to create a really comprehensive Operations Manual!
Note: When purchasing a commercial packaged application, the vendor's manuals will not cover all aspects of operating the integrated application!
Ask the customer which chapters you do have to deliver and which you do not need to deliver!
Using this template the customer will understand you estimations of man days and costs for this deliverable!
- Use this template to create those lists you really need!
- List all Servers and Applications and map what's running where.
- No software to install - a simple spreadsheet which fits the purpose.
Start now - the longer you wait, the more cumbersome the collection later!
Life Cycle Management
This checklist for IT Server Upgrade will help you to avoid that an important item is forgotten.
This vendor- and operating system independent checklist deals with "big picture"
and helps to evaluate all potential impact of upgrading a server, e.g.
- adding CPU's
- replacing CPU's with faster CPU's
- Operating System Upgrade
- adding Storage
- replacing a server with a newer, bigger model
This checklist for IT Application Upgrade will help you to avoid that an important item is forgotten.
Purpose of this document is to support
- The decision making process of "should we upgrade now or later ? or not at all?"
- The impact analysis ? identification of all internal and external dependencies.
- The gathering of requirements for the upgrade.
- The selection of the best upgrade approach ("In-Place Upgrade" or "New Installation").
- Providing input required for the Upgrade Planning.
101 check items required for successful deployment.
This template with in-depth explanations of tasks required to plan outages on medium to large IT Systems will avoid that important steps are forgotten.
These documents explain the importance of proper decommissioning and support you in planning this important but too often neglected last step in an application's life cycle.
Purpose of this document is to support the creation of
- an application specific plan,
- instructions
- and final checklist
Three very comprehensive, generic checklist-templates assists you in creating a customized, application specific cloning checklist.
This significantly
- reduces the time to create such a checklist
- reduces the risks of running into (forgetting about) typical traps
