It’s 11:30 p.m. on a Friday, when John, the IT operations manager, hears his phone ring. The ringtone is distinct, one that John has programmed so that he can instantly recognize a call from the office. He answers the phone, and on the other end is Valentina, one of the senior software developers at John’s office. There’s a problem in the production environment.
The last software release included additional functionality that changed how the application interacted with the database. But because of a lack of adequate hardware in the testing environments, the entire application couldn’t be tested prior to release. Around 10:30 this evening, a scheduled task that runs only quarterly began executing. The job was missed during the testing phase, and even if it wasn’t, there isn’t enough data in the test environment to create an accurate test. Valentina needs to stop the process, but she doesn’t have access to the production servers. She’s spent the last 45 minutes searching through the company intranet site to find John’s contact information. John is the only person Valentina knows who has the production access she needs.