MP294 'Review of DCC Maintenance Activities and Temporary Additional Allowance'

The DCC is required to maintain DCC Systems to avoid service disruption as much as possible. This includes completing Planned Maintenance and Unplanned Maintenance activities to ensure vital components are running, are up to date, are reliable and secure.

The SEC does not currently contain detail of what might be considered an allowable reason for instigating Unplanned Maintenance and therefore it could be perceived to be used to enable short notice User impacting work.

In addition to this, services delivered by DCC have grown (number of Service Providers / amount of change) and the increased complexity as well as less time available to complete post deployment may be exacerbated by new Data Service Provider (DSP).

Furthermore, consideration is needed on activity that sits outside of Planned and Unplanned maintenance as there is currently no view of maintenance that sits outside of Planned and Unplanned Maintenance activities.

The Proposer (DCC) and Co-sponsor (OVO) are currently looking to do the following with regards to DCC Maintenance:

• a full review of the best practise to be followed, and the allowable purposes of using Unplanned Maintenance;
• consider opportunities to manage increasing change volumes in a controlled way until the new DSP 2 is delivered via temporarily additional maintenance; and
• introduce Planned Resilience Maintenance, where Maintenance activity is not expected to impact services to Devices connected to 100,000 or more Communications Hubs.