Process
| 1: | Our shop has no processes to help manage our mission-critical environment. We simply do not have the time and resources to do this, so which ones are the bare minimum? |
| A1: |
That's an easy one. After years of research, the bare minimum for supporting mission-critical systems are these processes:
You need all three. These are the minimum requirements for building a world-class infrastructure. See Chapter 6. |
| 2: | Do we still need service level agreements? |
| A2: | Without a doubt—there needs to be external service level agreements established with your customers and internal service levels within IT between Applications Development and Production Support. Client/server computing has made communication worse than ever before. Establishing service levels are more critical than ever before! See Chapter 5 for more details. |
| 3: | We know the importance of metrics and how critical they are to have, but we just don't have the time to invest. What would you suggest? Which metric is the most critical to start out with? |
| A3: | Find a very simple method of measuring customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction should be measured each and every time a user calls the help desk with a request for service. Don't bother sending out monthly or quarterly surveys. This old method of measuring customer satisfaction is very ineffective. Reengineer a new process. This will set you off in the right direction. It will tell you which areas need to be addressed immediately. See Chapter 2 for more details. |
| 4: | Should we establish a separate organization to implement metrics? |
| A4: | No this should be the responsibility of each manager in his or her respective area. |
| 5: | Should personnel involved in infrastructure activities be concerned with the processes that take customer requests and address these requests? |
| A5: | Yes. How the requests are prioritized and addressed significantly influences the layering of technologies and the performance of the infrastructure. |
| 6: | Can I manage client/server and host-based applications using the same processes? |
| A6: | Yes. Many IT departments resort to different change-management processes for the single-tiered versus n-tier application software. The same promotion process should be used to ensure that the IT organization functions as one. |
| 7: | How do we manage all these desktops? |
| A7: | Desktop management is a very difficult job. Even with the growth of Web-based systems, basic desktop software is here to stay for a long time. We recommend that you look at software distribution utilities. You may find that the cost of the software is less than the cost of people power to keep all that software current and the asset recorded. |
| 8: | What about using a centralized project management tool? |
| A8: | One of the major problems that we found was that the IT personnel were overscheduled. Projects fail due to poor project management because resources are scheduled but aren't available when they are needed. Implementing a department-wide, project management tool is labor intensive, but the returns can be spectacular. |
| 9: | How do we schedule staff on multiple projects and support activities? |
| A9: | We again recommend that you look at a comprehensive project management tool that permits personnel resource scheduling across multiple projects. This way the employee can see what projects they are assigned to and the project manager can see who is assigned to the project. It really does work! |
| 10: | Do we need a career path for our staff or will the market take care of that? |
| A10: | Just because the supply and demand for information technology skills is not in balance, the market will not cultivate your in-house personnel. We strongly recommend that you clearly establish an employee's career and the training and skills development that will be required to move ahead. Of course, this is all tied to the overall performance of the company and IT department. |
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