Scheduling FINAL (Best Practices)

One of the most important process when setting a TWSd environment is when and how to extend the plan and there are several options in optman that are related to this process.

I already presented this topic during the ASAP conference in 2011, but due to the important, and many users that are not yet familiar with that, I think this is a good argument to start the blog.

First decision to make is when to run the FINAL job stream to extend the plan. The decision have to take in consideration several elements like:

• At what time most of the batch workload is complete and the plan extension have the minimum impact?
• When are the administrators available in case there is any issue with the plan extension?
• Are the administrators available in the weekends and holidays?
• How many hours of buffer I want to keep in order to be able to fix extension problems without impacting the productions?

The result of this decision could be for example that I want to schedule FINAL only on working days, running at 7 AM and with 5 hours of buffer.
That means we need a FINAL scheduled at 7 AM on working days that extends the plan until the 12 PM of the next working day.