Management by Exception

During last week’s “delightful” 3-mile walk for Peace House in 90-degree heat and 70 percent humidity, Pat Cameron, Chuck Losinski, and I started talking about one of the key ingredients to lights-out automation. We were discussing how busy we are at work and at home, and it reminded us how important the concept of “management by exception” is in our everyday life.

We all agreed that it can be difficult to remember the places we’ve been and the encounters we’ve had. But, it was easy to remember the exceptions, or unique things, that happened along the way. For me, it’s the little mishaps that make a trip memorable, things like a blown tire in a rental car, or an extremely delayed flight because of weather. These exceptions are vivid in my mind.

The same concept is so true for managing computer systems. You have to eliminate all of the routine “noise” and deal only with the day’s exceptions. And, if you can automate the exceptions with a few rules, you’re even further ahead of the game. With the Robot family of products, we have places for defining exceptions—like a job that’s running late, a library that’s growing too fast, or a message ID that indicates a problem.

We have too many things coming at us in our lives and in our computer technology. We really only have time to discuss or deal with the exceptions. So, it’s the exceptions in our computer processes that should get our attention when we manage our systems. I can’t imagine how difficult some of you have it because you’re still monitoring jobs, resources, or QSYSOPR manually. Without job scheduling software and resource monitoring software, how do you stay successful?