What's Your Downtime Opportunity?

A few weeks ago I spotted a former neighbor. We spent a few minutes catching up and I asked him about his work.

His company installs commercial refrigeration, building cold rooms and installing rows of freezers and industrial refrigerators for grocery stores, warehouses and kitchens across the northwest US. I anticipated quarantines and shutdowns would have brought the business to a standstill. Instead, he reported they were fully booked and turning down work.

When schools closed, the “summertime” work normally reserved until classes end was bumped forward. School districts and universities were taking advantage of the closure to push the timelines on capital improvements.

There’s a lesson in this for operations and database teams. We support and manage systems expected to be available 100% of the time. We rarely have chances to work on “wish list” items—installing a patch, moving to faster storage, or partitioning a table. Upstream failures provide that opportunity but only if we’re prepared with an itinerary of potential projects, action plans, and approval from management to make things happen on short notice in a potentially chaotic situation.

Test and validate all the “if only we had a window” work now. Document and time the steps. Prioritize them and put them out in Jira as pending projects so they’re ready to go if an environment goes down.

Maintenance windows aren’t always scheduled and being able to react when they present themselves beats sitting on your hands while things are down or reflecting on what could have been!