Best Practices for Authoring Capability in PROD Environment

[Penny]

We have Cognos 11 and serve several major business areas each with a limited group of authors.  We are currently discussing whether or not to allow the authoring capability in PROD.  We currently allow authors to author in PROD, but they cannot save to Team Content. 

Recently there was an incident where an author modified a production report, saved it in their My Content, and then reported a problem with the report (it produced an error and did not run).  These changes did not go through any formal testing or quality review.  My view is to disallow authoring in PROD for the following reasons (currently we are working on relational reports with a difficult database schema so reports are not always easy to create) :


1.  All production reports should have passed testing and quality review.  How do we know the report is producing correct results.
2.  If auditors request proof of change control on a report, this is not possible if authors are modifying reports in PROD.
3.  Reports that exist in a user's My Content is not available to any other user.  What if the user wins the lottery?

I am curious to know what other organizations are doing and for what reasons.  Please share your thoughts.

Thank-you 

[TomCognos]

Bit of an age old question.

We let authors create reports in PRD. We set them up with a shared area where they can write reports and save them (they actually did started Report Studio development on their own). But. We absolutely do not support this area, not the reports, not the numbers in those reports.

All PRD content that is promoted into the standard read/run only area is naturally UAT'd and signed off. If a user created report is required to go into the general population it then is regressed back to dev for standardisation and a tidy up, its then run through the formal UAT and sign off process. This is non negotiable.

Also all content in a My Folders area is accessible for the admin to copy out and into their My Folders area for review. If the user wins the lottery the I would suggest asking them very nicely if they like to share.

EDIT
Also you can add governors to your package to limit rows returns, joins, tables etc. You could even have a secondary package that the users can see/access purely for their development.