Process, process, process
There's a great post over at The Corporate Rat and The Elusive Cheese- The Importance of Process. Let me share a nugget that summarizes it nicely.
A good process is really like a well designed resilient network. No one really appreciates it when everything is working as it should. But when something does not work and suddenly ‘well designed individual elements’ fail miserably as a complete network while interacting with each other, all hell breaks loose.
The whole post is well worth the read. It also pointed out an obvious analogy to me that I've used a couple times since.
When performing network design, especially for VoIP, Quality of Service (QoS) is often a concern. I've taught many classes that touched on QoS issues. Some of those classroom discussions on QoS last 30 minutes, but sometimes, depending on the particular course, we'll spend many hours defining and describing QoS.
QoS can best be summarized with words like predictablity and consistency. Providing QoS in the network is really about stabilizing the network design so that the performance environment is a consistent, known factor. Unpredictability makes it difficult to deliver VoIP services reliably.
QoS is all about process and repeatability.
Technorati Tags: VoIP, QoS, reliability, consistency, predictability
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