Maintenance tasks, equipment upgrades and installations must be completed regularly — potentially creating disruptions and preventing employees from doing their work. This policy is designed to help your organization determine procedures for scheduling and communicating server, system and network downtime with the goal of minimizing the impact and inconvenience for your staff, clients and contractors.

From the policy

The IT department must regularly perform maintenance, upgrades and other service on organizational servers, systems and networks either for upkeep or restorative purposes. This work often results in either intentional or unintentional downtime.

Communicating prospective scheduled downtime in advance to proper staff members who rely upon these resources helps ensure that this work does not cause operational outages or performance issues. It also enables staff to prepare and plan accordingly for these outages or prospective outages. This helps optimize business operations and ensure employees can do their jobs as effectively as possible.