How to take a vacation

Is there anyone that can be trained up enough to be dangerous?

We’ve had times when there’s only one, but management have been willing to find another person who can take on support while the primary is away.

Might be possible to contract an extra support person, but I’m sure there’s little niggles that need to be handled in a specific way which is difficult to document.

It’s not really realistic to be on support while on holidays, so I’d be putting the case to management that it’s in their best interest to find someone else to hold the fort, otherwise it’s their risk that they may be out of action for a couple of days while they try to find a contractor to work on it. This holds for if your sick or get hit by a car too, not just holidays.

THINK OF THE CHILDREN 😯 !!!

Them saying “we don’t have budget” is BS, they’ll have a lot higher cost if things go wrong with no-one trained up.

maybe tone it up or down depending on your relationship with management and how much you can get away with.

What’s a vacation?   😥

Yeah I figured as much, I’m just being daft, so take no offence.

still probably good to discuss it with management, even if its “cross skill” with another application person, so that if one of you are missing, there’s still someone able to do the basics.

You could leverage Infor Services to cover for you while you’re away.

So Jeff, were you able to take a vacation yet?  If so, what did you end up doing?  Of course there are always contractors out there who might be willing to help out on an on-call basis.

Rob

I know the feeling…..I came from a hospital being the only cloverleaf person for several years….and then I got recalled for the Navy…..My hospital hired a contract programmer to come in while I was gone.  I was only gone for 5 months, but there wasn’t any issues.

I am currently working for that company and have to say, it’s a great option for that lone interface person.  It’s piece of mind when/if you go “off the grid” and don’t have any other options.   I can send you info for the company I work for.

With all that said…you need vacations!!!  It’s healthier for you!

Thanks,

Donna

Train your help desk to do the simple things like bounce interfaces, and rely on ALERTS to fire and just schedule your time when nothing is going on like updates, upgrades, systems downtimes. your users should accommodate that much..

and

whats a vacation… lol

I agree with Mike Brown here.

I am also the Lone Ranger with the Interfaces. I trained the Help Desk and the Business Analysts to be able to manage all of the common issues that go wrong when the automated side fails.

The Help Desk covers simple things such as restarting processes and threads; where the Business Analysts have deeper knowledge of the inner workings of the Xlates and/or code that makes them work. Each are required to know that kind of information so that I may go away for a week and not need to worry. I also have trained one business analyst that is more general purpose and CAN do the work needed in my absence; just not as efficient nor as effective. When I return, I am briefed on what they did and I make any changes necessary to make it how it needs to be.

I made EXTENSIVE and COMPLETE documentation for things that require more than that; for example: Rebooting the Red Hat Linux Server, what to do should that goes off into an unknown state and becomes unresponsive, how to restart the interface engines, etc.

My documents come complete with pictures and verbiage just to make it clear on what to do.

That covers about 99% of the issues. Then there are the exceptionally rare cases; where I am needed to look into it. I usually take a computer with me and my cell phone, but even then I may not be reached. Text messages and voicemail always comes in after you regain service. Whenever I go on vacation, I just make it a point to make it out to an area that has service and play catch-up. The majority of the time, even when called, it is NOT an urgent need and can wait until my return.

That remaining 0.01% will just have to go unchecked until I return. 😉

I did the same for documentation and I trained the night shift, day shift and weekend shift on the help desk to cover, it works outstanding with a few hickups. because as we all know the help desk rotates a lot.

The application owners handle the ALERTS and get pages when the vendor drops a connection and they call the vendor not the interface team.

I supplied visios, PDF’s and document, document document and you can take time off. but still leave yourself on the ALERTs so you know everything that goes on.

mike 😉