Being anal ain't all bad

I tend to be rather short with people and process that I consider overly burdened with steps and detail. In other words I hate 'ANAL' people. Folks who have their list of steps for everything, and follow those steps with religious zeal, bordering on fanaticism. You know the folks, the ones who want the results of report x ordered the same way each and every time as and example. Such a person calls out the national guard when a software change presents output in a different order. Such a person questions the validity of such output simply because two rows of output are swapped. I used to think of this kind of behavior as a bad thing, wasteful of precious time that I have never had enough of. Sweating the small stuff, I felt sorry for these folks, while being annoyed with them in my interactions. These folks are everywhere after all.

Hypocritically perhaps, I find my interactions with systems to follow such an anal pattern. Initially this behavior on my part was undertaken to simply allow the kind of compliance that I feel will come in any such system rollout to the larger whole. Sure the steps followed religiously in testing and development are overkill, unnecessary and wasteful of precious time, but at some point, when I am going to be tasked with deployment and the whole thing gets put under the scrutiny of external eyes, those anal bastards are gonna want all the i's dotted and the t's crossed. I better just do it at the outset, it's better that way. At least that's what I have always told myself.

One such measure I have found myself, initially begrudgingly so, undertaking is to have a complete history of each and every version of project z that is being deployed to a client even in test. This is not to say that through the miracles of source control I could recreate said archive. No rather I am talking about having each version archived in it's own bundle, in a repository on the clients own environment. If the client has a training and production version then there is an archive of each of these items for every version that has ever been sent along to the client. Overkill? Perhaps but required for certain levels of compliance with certain regulatory bodies whose sole existence is to ensure that measures such as this are in force, else bad things will happen inflicted by ( insert big brother here ).

I have been at a training seminar for the past few days. Each day spent from 7am through 6pm in sessions. Of course we have a client who has an urgent need for 16 new and changes to a rollout that I must also attend to. So even though I am away I have to get this stuff done as well. Long nights in hotel room working remotely, and many a early morning deployment to test environment for the clients review. As you might imagine, many of these nights have had me performing these tasks in in a very impaired state of exhaustion. Mistakes in deploying a project of this type can be catastrophic and given the mental condition I am in in these scenarios are inevitable. In these instances I now see a new use for the Anal behavior I have trained myself to follow. It provides the appropriate safety net for the require CYA necessary when you do something like deploy a training version over a production installation at 4am.......


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