I'm sure you've seen these sort of memes in MSP and sysadmin forums:
But there can be some real truth and benefit to adopting a "Read Only Friday" mentality and practice with your MSP.
What is a "Read Only Friday"?
If you've been humored by the memes, threads and jokes around a Read Only Friday, this is probably not new to you. "Read Only Friday" is a reference to not making any major changes on a Friday. The concept behind this from a support standpoint is to only make changes that are critical for production on Friday. Sure there's some teams that are looking to take it easy on a Friday and into the weekend, but that's just a bonus of not making major changes on a Friday. There's a real strategy to this and some good reasons to take this approach.
Workload/testing:
When making a change to a customer's environment or even a large internal change (Rolling out a new RMM/Anti-virus tool?), Friday may not be your best day to test the system. Typically this is a slower day for users, they'll be less likely to "test and confirm this is working" and perhaps the customer is not fully staffed with employees often taking a Friday off for a 3 day weekend to enjoy. This can lead to one of those users, that may have been able to test, finding the issue when they return on Monday morning. An issue first thing on a Monday morning can really set the tone with your customer for the week. This is really something to consider as your ideal test would be a full workload/all users, but you'll rarely get this on a Friday.
Weekends? MSPs have weekends?:
Yes! an MSP can actually have a weekend! Well, we know how it is and there's always weekend work, but why compound it with a change made on a Friday afternoon? You're likely not fully staffed over the weekend, have an on-call engineer, and also its the weekend! On top of this, your customer is likely not happy to be working on the weekend already, and if they run into an issue, the customer's experience really degrades when they have to reach out to support on a weekend. Save yourself those angry calls and hold off on those changes until you know you have your team ready to back you up.
Engineer Burnout:
We've been there. You've had a rough week with some other issues and you're catching up or finishing up some resolution Monday through Friday and now it is finally time to get back to that big update to your image on Friday and your team is cramming this in. You and your team are exhausted, this is when mistakes can happen. A simple checkbox doesn't get clicked, a registry setting missing, and now you put that in production on a Friday. Make these changes when you and your team are fresh. Bring your "A game" on Monday and tackle that update!
Vendor Support:
I'm not saying this as a vendor, I'm saying this as an MSP. Vendor support will almost always be less than optimal over a weekend. That new software install on Friday may need some support from a vendor, and now you've pushed it live. Vendors will often have limited hours of support, if any, on the weekends and now you're stuck with an issue until Monday. Save yourself and your customer from this potential scenario.
Ideas for your "Read Only Friday":
- Assess/resolve critical production issues as you normally would
- Avoid big changes to your environment or a customer's
-Use Friday to plan any changes with your team and the customer for the next week. Be strategic, thorough and ready.
-Consider changes going live early on a Tuesday morning, with staging on Monday afternoon. Monday mornings can sometimes turn into a "fire drill" and typically Tuesdays are more likely to be fully staffed for your team and the customer to test.
Hopefully your Read Only Fridays give your team the break they may need, save your customers potential headaches and give them an overall better experience. Have a great day (and weekend!).
Chuck Mikuzis
Solutions Support Manager at Nerdio
PS: An extra fun site: https://isitreadonlyfriday.com/
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