Standard Service Levels for Incident Management

Most companies engage  a minimum “3-Tier/Level of IT Support Structure for any incident management.  The scopes and resources involves for each level are stated below:

Level 1 Support

• Provide end users with single point of contact on all system related issues
• Consists of a team of at least 4 personnel to support 24×7
• Basic knowledge of the system with FAQ/Support guide to troubleshoot simple, common incidents
• Monitor system health and notify higher support level if system trigger appear
• Escalation to Level 2 Support if an incident is beyond their knowledge
• Provides basic preventive maintenance to the system.  E.g. backups, health checks

Level 2 Support

• Provides in-depth application support to customer’s incident
• Consists of a team with at least 2 personnel, this is to ensure that 1 person is always available when an incident is escalated to this level for resolution
• In-depth knowledge of the system.  Able to make code changes immediately with full knowledge of the impact of the change to the whole system
• Able to advise work-around if incident is not easily replicated and at the same time continue to work on investigating the cause.
• Provides advanced preventive maintenance.  E.g. Process improvement, Scripts improvement, Database tuning, Application tuning etc.
• Escalate to the next level for decision making and customer management.

Level 3 Support

• Provides point of escalation when Level 2 Support is not able to resolve the problem
• Consists of the Application manager or/and IT account manager/or Business Owner
• Make critical decision on how to resolve the incident (usually complex incident not easily resolved)
• Manage the customer and inform relevant parties, e.g. business account manager, etc
• Escalate to Level 4, if required
• Bring in additional resources, if required, to fix the issue

Level 4 Support

• Consists of the management team
• Manage customer from management perspective and inform relevant parties, eg Managing Directors of affected countries, CIO, CEO, etc
• Activate more resources, if required

Art of Preparing Presentations – Understand what your audience like to know

When we are preparing for reports or presentation materials for specific group of readers, we need to know what the report is for, the reader’s job role to determine the level of detailed information for this group of users to understand and respond to the questions/clarifications we need from them through the whole process.

When we communicate either through verbal (e.g. phones, meeting) or non-verbal (e.g. emails, presentation materials, reports) there are 4 types of message that are present in every message/sentence we send:

• What we mean to say
• What we actually say
• What the other person hears
• What I think they hear

Hence whenever we communicate, we must always strive for clarity.  The message you intend to send is the one that should be received.

My Rules of Thumb for Presentation Slides

1. Not more than 6 words in a sentence.
2. Be specific and concise.
3. Do not put in too many information on one slide.  Breakdown into points and add another slide to continue.

Air Freight – Origin Processes

The following topic covers the current RFP (Request for Proposal) that I was working to cover the transportation of Products by 3PL (third-party logistic provider) from China’s ODMs to our Business Partner’s designated locations, through specific lanes defined by the carriers.

This is what happen at the Origin before the 3PL is to perform export custom clearance at Origin.

1. Booking:  3PL will provide the one (1) day ahead shipping plan with ODM and process the booking to 3PL at  a specific time (local time) on the same day of pick up.
2. Loading: 3PL agrees with the ODM on packing the pallets according to our business partner’s  packaging requirements per platform. 3PL will inspect and reject any cargo which does not meet the packing standards.
3. Pick Up: 3PL pick ups the Products at the designated site designated and  provide a trailer with available capacity at our Business Partner’s specified facility for the pickup of Product.
4. Export Custom Clearance: 3PL uses the ODM’s export documentation for the export customs clearance at origin. Business partner provides resale invoice for customs clearance at destination.  Upon receipt of Business Partner’s commercial documentation, 3PL, through it’s designated broker obtains customs clearance while the transport aircraft is airborne, and prior to arrival in destination airport.
5. Custom Clearance at Destination Hub: 3PL picks up the shipments in China, and delivers the Custom Cleared cargo to the destination in-country hubs.  3PL uses the commercial invoice for customs clearance and also to ensure the correct Importer of Record (IOR) is declared in custom form basing on the commercial invoice. 3PL files the Bill of Entry, sent to Business Partner for approval, before finalizationas to ensure the Business Partner pays the correct customs duty
6. Delivery: 3PL delivers the Products to designated facilities.

Inter-routing of Feeds within sites in 1 Organisation

Recently we have office shifting from Level 7 to Level 6 and all old connections for the servers/workstations on Level 7 will be upgraded to a bigger network bandwidth.  The same goes for our Xiamen web server which is the transmission channel for receiving and sending electronic data feeds to our Customer’s site in Penang, Malaysia.  This results a new IP address to be issued for this web server.    However we can only hold on to the old IP address till Sunday, June 21 and after this date, the old cable’s connection will be disconnected.  We tried to route the network routes from Xiamen to Penang via Hong Kong but this fails due to the below reason:

• The web server in Hong Kong located in DMZ (which mean outside Organization A network) while Xiamen database server located in Intranet (which mean inside Organization A network). Obviously, the machine outside Organization A network cannot access those machine in Organization network. Otherwise, Organization A network is in danger.

• Probably there are some ways to configure in firewall and allow particular machine to access back from DMZ to Intranet, but it need network guys on the mapping.  We later realized that Xiamen is resided in an Intranet architecture and South Korea is using Intranet machine (Organization A network) to access Customer’s web service gateway n Penang. It will implied that Xiamen might able to move their web service program to Penang without any connectivity issue.

We tried out the alternative with South Korea’s team and as what we guess, we finally get the feeds to route from Xiamen, to Seoul and finally to Penang!  The ACLs over at the Customer’s site remains unchanged (as what we previously provided to them for Xiamen’s public IP addresses).

Next, we have succesfully connect Xiamen directly to Penage with the new network bandwidth and preparing for another weekend’s migration to this new connection.

Database Server Upgrade Implementation

We have a project to upgrade the existing MS SQL Server 2000 to MS SQL Server 2005.  As this project activity is running in parallel with the change requests for August deployment we need to ensure the servers required for the deployment does not impact the tight timelines for the deliverable.

The implementation strategy for August deployment are:

1. Database server upgrade and migration to test environment.  This is to be done before deploying new codes to the test environment for user acceptance testing.
2. System Integration Testing – Data Integrity Testing
3. Deployment the new codes to test server for IT and User acceptance testing.
4. User Acceptance Testing – Functionality testing.
5. Database server upgrade and migration to Production environment.  This is done after obtaining the user sign-off from the UAT that the application and newly upgrade database server are working as business as usual (BAU).
6. Update the user guides and training for the end users.

In this way, we have worked out the dependencies and outline the implementations that both activites run in parallet and minimize any project schedule’s timelines.

Not every feature is a “must to have” to improve web usability

Changes requests keep on filling up the spreadsheet.  For every session, we went through each requirement with the Customer to understand what exactly is required and how it may impact the solution.

Some requests are just ‘nice-to-have’ features, some are unable to be supported by the solution due to the initial system requirements being designed for the solution.  The application was merely just an online shipment tracker tool but now it has almost included order management, procurement, reports and now on to add on marketing functions!  We need to revamp the existing solution’s architecture to cater the new technologies to support these features.

We need to understand the ‘real’ reason for each feature and do they really have critical impact to the Operations/business?  These “good-to-have” features may assist to improve the usability but we need to understand the business flows and to see if these features really assist/improve the end users’ experience based on the works they are using with the application and it may slow down the application and even affects the system performance.

Next step, we are to evaluate the system performance again after all the approved changes have been implemented to see if there is any further improvements and to consider the going-forward plans to enhance the application.  We are using the same evaluation plan, web stress testing to capture the measurements for comparsion and assessment with the Application and Infastructure teams.

Stakeholders’ Buy-in To the New Project Plan

We have revised the project plan and the project is going to be delayed by 3 months, with the reasons identified that are causing the delay.  This had brought out to the Steering Committee (or do we really have a Steering Committee in the first place???).  The reasons we have are:

1. Resources that are to be involved with this project B were actively involved in earlier project A that conflicts with the activities that were being planned.
2. The project A was on high priority list and it is a dependency to Project B.  We have to complete project A before we can start to engage with the Customer to work on Project B.
3. The resources involved in Project A acquire the same knowledge that we need to work on Project B.

During last Thursday kickoff meeting, the revised time line was shown and  had presented to them the information for the delay.  Indeed this did not please the stakeholders in the meeting but the project team had done what they had to mitigate the risks and ultimately we tried all possibilities and this was the only way to move the project forward.  The action is now leave to the Business Manager to inform the Customer of this delay and alternatively what we are trying to do to see if we can speed up or agree on the iterative releases of the solution  at the end of the feasibility study phase (refer to link for information on DSDM -http://www.codeproject.com/KB/architecture/dsdm.aspx)

The next step we need to do to get the stakeholders’ agreement that we are working towards the new go-live date and to inform the Customer about this so that all of us are aligned and start to plan the remaining activities to be involved for each party.

Validaty period for the costings for the Infastructure proposal

This has never come to my mind that vendors will keeps on changing their quotations for the hardware, software and the service support costings due to the competitive economy nowadays.

We has reviewed a previous proposal that was about 2 months old and we got the revised costing from the vendors and had to update it for our Account Manager for next week’s workshop.  The initial proposal was given to the Customer 2 months ago but there was no update from the Customer on the moving forward plan on how to proceed with the proposal.  There are lots of changes happened for the last 2 months and so was the pricing quoted by our vendors as we just gone through the review today.

No doubt, the Account Manager does not accept the changes in the costing, much to the surprise to hear from her that the Customer was currently evaluating the initial copy.  To our surprise, we had never knew the Customer was looking at it and we cannot absorb the additional costs for the hardware since we are outsourcing to external vendor, not internally.  On second thoughts we did not explain clearly in the proposal of the validity of the pricings we had quoted in the document as to set the expectations and possible changes as the evaluation has taken place so that immediate attention is placed to get the review done and decision is being made with the Customer.

As so, I have taken notice to include a clause at the last page of the proposal to indicate the validity period of the pricings that we had quoted as to avoid future misunderstanding.   What a lesson I had learnt today!

I have moved on to Program management….is it?

First day back to work from vacation, I have received a ’surprise’ email from our Global Account Manager to understand the new project from our EMEA counterpart.

It sounds strange to me why I have to be involved as we have an EMEA IT team supporting this account over there.  Perhaps we are really lack of a Global IT Head to communicate and align the solutions for this account as every region will work on their own ways and ‘duplicate’ systems around the globe.  This is not the direction that our Global account wants to have, and I do see the need to have a Global IT head to lead all regions on this vision.

Now I have to play this role, ensures all regions are aligned and promote ‘reuseability’ among regions, this is a very huge responsiblitye I need to manage to fulfill the vision.  The first thing I need to do is to gather all the existing applications’ inventory for each country/region to see what are the solutions we had can be reused for other countries or future RFQ enquiries.

Hope I can work this out……

Organisation’s Directions – Where are they?

It has been a 1 year’s anniversary of my employment with this current employer.  Since the day I took up the job position, I had not been involving or work on any of the job scopes that were indicated for this role.  All the while I had been “fire-fighting” production issues, managing on-going projects for others to get things move on.  Non of the things are working on the new initiatives and the directions on how to start off these initiatives as well.

At some points I were wondering what is the role of the regional IT organization and in order to do our parts on the new initiatives and business-IT alignments regionally do we really understand the changes on the cost-effectiveness, cost strategy among individual country IT organization, resource allocation and skills’ upgrade, roles and responsibilities of local country IT organizations, reporting structure, in-house IT support service and policies etc.  It was so embarrassing in one occasion with the business support team that we in the regional team do not know the exact scopes and charging mechanism of the SLA agreement imposed from each local country in which in return is charged back to our business unit for yearly IT support and maintenance’s contract with the Customer.  This is really very disappointing.

With the new goal-settings defined by my Manager for this year’s Key Performance Index (KPI), I do hope I have a clearer picture of the Organisation’s directions and alignments to make myself moving forward to achieve these objectives.  I pray so….