GIET UNIVERSITY, GUNUPUR

IT INFRASTRUCTURE AND MANAGEMENT

LECTURE NOTES
UNIT-II
Staffing for Systems Management
1Q) How do u differentiate between Skill Sets and Skill Levels? (LONG)
Staffing for systems management also has a requirements phase in the sense that
necessary skill sets and skill levels need to be identified and prioritized early on.
A skill set is defined as technical familiarity with a particular software product,
architecture, or platform.
For example, one enterprise may use primarily IBM mainframes with IBM’s
information management system (IMS) databases while another may use mostly
Sun Solaris platforms with Oracle databases. The skill sets needed to implement
systems management functions in these two environments are significantly
different.
Within a skill set there is another attribute known as the skill level. The skill
level is simply the length of experience and depth of technical expertise an
individual has acquired and can apply to a given technology.
The process of determining and prioritizing the required skill sets and levels has
several benefits:
1. Quantifying the skill sets that will be needed to implement selected functions
forces you to more accurately reflect the diversity of technical experience your
environment will require.
2. Estimating necessary skill levels within each required skill set will reflect the
amount of technical depth and expertise that will be needed.
3. The quantifying and qualifying required skill sets and levels are valuable aids
in building the business cases.
Examples:
Mainframe Environment Skill Set Matrix:
2Q) Discus the below terms: (LONG)
a) Applicability: - Applicability refers to an individual’s ability to put his or her skills and
experience to effective use. Employees may have years of experience with certain skill sets,
but, if lack of motivation or poor communication skills prevent them from effectively
applying the knowledge, it is of little value to an organization.
b) Experience: - Experience is normally thought of as the total number of years a person
has worked with a particular technology. An adage refers to distinguishing between someone
who has 10 years of actual experience in an area of expertise versus someone who has one
year of experience 10 times over. Depth, variety, and currency are three components of
experience that should be factored into any assessment of a person’s skill level.
C) Depth: - Depth refers to the level of technical complexity a person has mastered with a
given product or process. An example of this would be the ability to configure operating
systems or modify them with software maintenance releases as opposed to simply installing
them.
d) Variety: - Variety describes the number of different platforms or environments an
individual may have worked in with a certain technology. For example, one person may have
familiarity with a multi-platform storage backup system but only in a single version of UNIX
environment. Another individual may have a deeper understanding of the product from
having used it in several different platform environments.
e) Currency: - Currency refers to how recent the person’s experience is with a given product
or technology. IT in general is a rapidly changing industry, and specific technologies within it
may become outdated or even obsolete within a few years. A database administrator (DBA),
for example, may have extensive familiarity with a particular version of a database
management system, but if that experience took place longer than four to five years ago, it
may no longer be relevant.
3Q) Discuss the Skill Assessment Attributes and Characteristics. (SHORT)

4Q) What is the role of Weighting and Rating Matrix in determining Skill
Assessment. (LONG)
These weights may be assigned in terms of their relative importance to the
organization in which they are being used.
Any magnitude of number can be used, and in general the greater the
importance of the attribute the higher the weight. Naturally these weights will
vary from company to company. The attribute of an individual is then assessed
and given a
numerical rating.
For example, the rating could be on a 1-to-5 basis with 5 being the best. The
weight and rating are then multiplied to compute a score for each attribute. The
four computations are then summed for an overall score.
Table 3–5 shows an example of how this method could be used. With a rating
range from 1 to 5, the range of overall scores could vary between 10 and 50.
5Q) Discuss the Benefits and Drawbacks of Using Consultants and
Contractors. (SHORT)

6Q) Illustrate the necessary Steps for Developing Career Paths for Staff
Members (LONG)
The following three steps can help managers ensure that career pathing does not
become de-emphasized:
1. Conduct a skills assessment of each member of your staff. This should
determine what technical or managerial skills each member currently has or
aspires to obtain.
2. Match the future needs of your organization to those individuals who express
similar goals.
3. Plan out a career program of training, assignments, and mentoring to help the
employee and the organization obtain the desired results.

There are also three steps for employees to enable career-pathing to stay on the
front burner of priorities:
1. Determine your short-term career goals (3 to 5 years) and long-term career
goals (10 to 20 years).
2. Discuss your short- and long-term career goals with your manager and
request his or her assistance in attaining them.
3. This suggestion goes hand-in-hand with the second one. Take the initiative to
stay abreast of current developments in your chosen area of preference.
Investigate websites, join industry organizations, look into certification
programs.
 Unit-2 Chapter-2
Customer Service
7Q) Write a short note on SLA. (SHORT)
SLA is short for service level agreement and refers to a documented, negotiated
agreement between a representative from an IT department and a representative
from an end-user department concerning the quality of service delivered.
Common SLA metrics include percent uptime availability, average response
times, and escalation procedures for problems.
8Q) List the Four Key Elements of Good Customer Service. (LONG),
(SHORT)
There are four elements of good customer service:
1) Identifying your key customers
2) Identifying key services of key customers
3) Identifying key processes that support key services
4) Identifying key suppliers that support key processes

1) Identifying your key customers: -One of the best ways to ensure you are
providing excellent customer service is to consistently meet or exceed the
expectations of your key customers. In transitioning to a service-oriented
environment, infrastructure professionals sometimes struggle with identifying
who their key customers are.
The following list summarizes characteristics of key customers of a typical
infrastructure:
1. Someone whose success critically depends on the services you provide.
2. Someone who, when satisfied, assures your success as an organization.
3. Someone who fairly and thoroughly represents large customer organizations.
4. Someone who frequently uses, or whose organization frequently uses, your
services.
5. Someone who constructively and objectively critiques the quality of your
services.
6. Someone who has significant business impact on your company as a
corporation.
7. Someone with whom you have mutually agreed-upon reasonable
expectations.
2) Identifying Key Services of Key Customers: -
The next step after identifying your key customers is to identify their key
services.
This step contains : validate, negotiate, and escalate
■ Validate. Within the guidelines of the prepared interview scripts, the
interviewers first validated their interviewees by assuring them that they were,
in fact, key customers. They then told the customers that they did indeed
critically need and use the services that we were supplying. Interviewers then
went on to ask what the customers’ current expectations were for the levels of
service provided.
■ Negotiate. If customers’ expectations were reasonable and obtainable, then
the parties discussed and agreed upon the type and frequency of measurements
to be used. If the expectations were not reasonable, then negotiations,
explanations, and compromises were proposed. If these negotiations did not
result in a satisfactory agreement, as would occasionally occur, then the
interviewer would politely agree to disagree and move on to other matters.
■ Escalate. Next the interviewer would escalate the unsuccessful negotiation to
his or her manager, who would attempt to resolve it with the manager of the key
customer.
3) Identifying Key Processes that Support Key Services: -
Negotiating realistic expectations of service leads into the third element of good
customer service: identifying key processes. These processes comprise the
activities that provide and support the key services of the customers. For
example, a legal department may need a service to retrieve records that have
been archived months previously. In this case, the activities of backing up the
data, archiving and storing it offsite, and retrieving it quickly for customer
access would be the key processes that support this key service.
4) Identifying Key Suppliers that Support Key Processes: -
Identifying key suppliers is the fourth element of good customer service. Key
suppliers are those individuals who provide direct input, in terms of products or
support, to the key processes. In our example in the prior section regarding the
legal department, some of the key suppliers would be the individuals
responsible for storing the data offsite and for retrieving it back to make it
accessible for users. Similarly, for the human resources example, the developers
of the commercial software security products and the individuals responsible for
installing and administering the products would be key suppliers for the data-
security processes.

9Q) Draw the traditional model of a basic work-flow process and explain.
(SHORT)
Suppliers provide input of some type into a process. In the case of an IT
production control department this could be data being fed into a program
stream that is part of a job execution process, or it could be database changes
being fed into a quality-assurance process. The output of the first process may
be updated screens or printed reports for users; the output of the second process
would be updated database objects for programmers.
10Q) What is the necessity to revise basic work-flow process. (LONG)
The problem with the traditional work-flow model is that it does not encourage
any collaboration between suppliers, processors, and customers, nor does it
measure anything about the efficiency of the process or the effectiveness of the
service.
The model is revised in several aspects to improve the quality of customer
service.
First, a key services box has been added to emphasize that the output of the
process should result in a deliverable and measurable service that is critical to
the success of the customer.
Second, the flow of work between all four elements is shown going both ways
to stress the importance of two-way communication between the individuals
involved with each element.
Third, each of the elements are
designated as key elements to highlight the fact that, while many customers and
suppliers may be involved in a particular work-flow process, there are usually
only a handful that significantly affect the quality of input and output.

11Q) List out The Four Cardinal Sins that Undermine Good Customer
Service. (SHORT)
1. Presuming your customers are satisfied because they are not complaining.
2. Presuming that you have no customers.
3. Measuring only what you want to measure to determine customer
satisfaction.
4. Presuming that written SLAs will solve problems, prevent disputes, and
ensure great customer service.

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