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Appendices

The appendices provide information that was either redundant or incidental to the information presented in the chapters. A quick glance:

A: Case Study for a New Online Operation

This is not a case study, but a hypothetical example of a business that is taking its legacy systems online for the first time. As such, it is not useful at "proving" the author's case, merely restating it in the form of a fiction story

B: Outage Classes

The author defines five kinds of "outages" and gives examples of each: physical outages (equipment), design outages (errors in software functionality), operations outages (a human user does something that causes malfunction); environmental outages (the network or power supply is interrupted); and reconfiguration outages (maintenance tasks take the system offline or make it inaccessible).

C: Business Case for Titanic

The author returns to his metaphor of the titanic and shows a sample business case, which catalogs the benefits and the perceived dollar-value of building the ship (costs, revenue streams, timeline), though it's largely an illustration without detailed explanation.

D: Risk in Online Operations Projects

The author defines risk as a potential for "loss or bad consequences" in a given course of action, generally as the result of variances in the predictions. In involves risk identification (predicting all the things that might go wrong), risk assessment (the percentage chance that they actually will go wrong), and risk quantification (the dollar-value of additional cost or revenues lost as a result of things going wrong).

For each risk, there are three responses: avoidance (action to reduce the probability of a risk occurring), mitigation (action to reduce the impact the risk will have if it occurs), and acceptance (developing a contingency plan to deal with a risk that materializes).

The author presents a lengthy "questionnaire" that can be applied to IT projects, but it is less in the nature of identifying risks than it is a checklist of things that have been mentioned earlier (ensuring the system has adequate capacity, ensuring applications handle errors neatly, ensuring maintenance can be done without taking the system offline, having a backup plan if a the network fails, etc.) - which are not risks, but elements to consider in planning.

E: What to Expect

The author provides some information for project managers familiar with "traditional" IT projects on the special needs of online operation projects. (EN: It seems unlikely today that there are any IT project managers who have not already worked online projects, but I suppose it's theoretically possible that a few may exist.)